Transparency

100% Donation Promise

We are a small charity that is completely led by volunteers. We all have work, education and family commitments and give our spare time to fundraising and overseeing our projects in Tanzania. This means we can donate 100% of your money to our projects.

We have around £1,800 of UK running costs each year (such as insurance, financial audits, web hosting and other fees we can’t really avoid) which are generously supported by donors who want to support our small core costs. We realise charitable organisations do need money to run their UK costs such as staff salaries but with our projects being in Tanzania it means we support local people to implement these projects.

In addition to this, the community the project is located in donate at least 10% of the labour costs of the project to show their commitment, increase ownership and sustainability. The communities are always extremely keen and willing to help make the project happen.

How much do our projects cost?

Our projects in Tanzania are very cost effective. Materials are a lot cheaper in the villages we work in, especially with the discounts we receive as a charity that’s helping children, so our impact is a lot greater for less money.

Our finances since being a registered charity

Our volunteer-led charity works hard to raise funds outside of our work and family commitments.

100% of donations go to our projects.

Being open about our mistakes

Only 1 in 2 people trust charities and we hope that by being ultra transparent with our projects, it will help to change that perception. It’s not easy to openly admit mistakes or ways we could have done things better, but we hope that by doing so more charities will feel happy to share their challenges and learnings so we’ll all get better at what we do.

Here’s our list of lessons which we’ve recorded since 2017.

2024

Time to get organised

The problems we’ve had so far with Ndoto in Action are good problems. We’ve had so much success in fundraising and project implementation which has meant we are very busy in the field. However, we noticed that we weren’t giving any time to ensure that the organisation’s documents, reports, photos and proposals were organised so that we could use them effectively and share what our organisations are doing. It felt frustrating to put projects on hold for a month but it has been worth it so far to take that time to get everything in order.

2023

Capacity building of our partner

Monitoring and Evaluation reports that MWH and our donors expected were not up to scratch. We conducted quarterly trainings on log frames and data collection to strengthen Ndoto in Action and Made with Hope’s Monitoring processes. We are really pleased with the implementation of these trainings.

Strengthening our collaboration

The work that the our founder, Eleanor, and Hussein (director of Ndoto in Action) was doing was becoming overwhelming. We were taking on too many projects which brought about a lot of work. It was time to invest in another staff member for Ndoto in Action. We are glad to have Lilian, our Community Development worker on board. She is doing a fantastic job.

Investing in transport

MWH has always been very focused on saving money and has never invested in a car, instead our projects have been implemented using local transport and drivers in Tanzania. However because of how many projects we were doing, the amount we were spending on transport to get to rural areas was increasing to the point where in one year of transport costs, we could’ve bought a car. This was the first year we had so many projects on so it was the first year of such high transport costs. So we decided it was time to purchase a car for Ndoto in Action using our unrestricted funding. This will save a lot of money in the future.

2022

Spreading our impact

We have embarked on a new partnership with Ndoto in Action, a registered Tanzanian NGO to enable us to focus on supporting government schools. We learnt that the private school model alongside the sponsorship programme was limiting as we did not have the resource to find and manage sponsors for children at new schools that we may built.

2021

A new partner

We have been partnering with CHETI in Tanzania since 2013. We have achieved so much together, building a secondary school, a primary school, school housing, clean water supplies and much more. We realised we were putting too much on CHETI and they didn’t have the capacity to do any new projects. We all felt it was best for them to focus on existing projects or smaller project that enhanced what was already there. We have since formed a partnership with Ndoto in Action (NIA) who have already helped take our school partnerships from 5 to 13 schools where we are doing lots of great work including classroom builds, clean water, girls menstruation education, girls toilets and working alongside the communities who are most enthusiastic to help their local school.

2020

Doing too much

2020 was a strange year for everyone and we couldn’t comprehend how it would affect Made With Hope. It was a stressful year before the pandemic hit because we were trying to do too much. We lost our only employee due to a lack of fundraising opportunities which meant our founder had to take up all of the work even though she was due to go on maternity leave in November 2020. We tried to carry on as normal but realised we needed to strip back our plans to be more realistic.

Communication network with other Tanzania charities

When the pandemic hit in Tanzania, it was difficult for us to understand what the governments plan of action was. There was a lot of hearsay and we realised our partner organisation on the ground felt quite isolated. We needed to help our partnership be resourceful to survive through whatever was going to happen and to keep safe as much as possible. We enabled our partner to set up a Whatsapp group with fellow Tanzanian organisations that were focused on supporting children in education who lived in poverty. This Whatsapp group was a good way to share policy updates, news about COVID regulations and resourceful ways to help keep the children’s education going even though they were not in school for a few months.

2019

Utilise local skills to keep up with demand

The growing demand for our programmes meant the demand for more people power to do this was greatly needed. We didn’t know this, but Tanzania has a lot of ‘Community Development Workers’ that are degree level as it is a professional role. We realised that it would be so beneficial if we hired a Community Development Worker. So we researched from other similar sized charities and found that a CDW would be a good fit for our work. We’re pleased to say this was an excellent change in our plans and Hussein is a great member of our team. He is helping us to scale our work and improve the quality of our projects in Tanzania. You can read more about him here.

Learn from others in the sector

We are thankful for the many other small charities in the UK who offer advice to one another. The Facebook group ‘Small International Development Charities’ is a source of so much support and advice and has been an integral part in our development in many areas, from fundraising and finance to strategic planning and compliance.

Diversify our income

In 2013-17 we were focused on community fundraising which helped to spread awareness, increase our tribe and make an impact. Then in 2018/9 we focused on Trusts and Foundations. It was obvious we struggled to do both types of fundraising at once because there’s only so much our team of volunteers could do. But since having our first staff member in Summer 2019 we’ve made traction to increase our fundraising efforts to diversify our income. We have now lay foundations to do the Yorkshire 3 Peaks, Kilimanjaro climbs and international volunteering in 2020.

2018

Go for bigger pots of money

Made With Hope solely did community fundraising for the first 4 years of our existence. We love to get out into the community, from working with schools, to hosting market stalls, to encouraging people to do 10km runs. We still do some of these things, but to ensure we could continue to raise income and scale our projects, we invested time into learning how to do Trusts and Foundations (grants) fundraising in 2018 which meant we could find bigger pots of money. It was important to us to diversify our income to ensure we were financially sustainable.

Pause & Reflect

By 2017, Made With Hope had many successful projects. But we realised we’d been so busy with fundraising and implementing projects, that we’d neglected our organisation’s policies, governance and didn’t have a clear strategy for the future. So we sought pro-bono support from a variety of organisations to help us recruit more Trustees, create a strategy, update our policies and generally make the charity more professional. It took time and energy away from fundraising, but we are pleased that we invested in our organisations future and now regularly review how we’re doing.

Ask for help

Our charity started by a passionate founder, who is still heavily involved today. But she is only one person, and could not carry on doing the bulk of operations herself. From 2018, we’ve invested time into recruiting more active Trustees and volunteers. We have hired our first staff member in July 2019 to help with fundraising and projects.

2017

Focus on certain problems

As a relatively new charity venturing into international development, our eyes were wide and we wanted to help children in every way possible. But we’re made up of a couple of volunteers with a certain amount of resources and this resulted in spreading ourselves too thinly, instead of becoming really good at just a few things. So, in 2017/8 we recruited Trustees with project management and strategic skills to lead a more focused and realistic strategy for our charity. This has helped us to focus on what we’re good at.

Listen & Contribute

One of our strengths is that we listen to the communities that we work with and partner with a Tanzanian NGO on the ground. Access to water was identified as a huge problem for the rural villages we work in. In early 2016 we fundraised and purchased a tractor to transport water from 10km for our schools to use. However, this wasn’t tackling the issue of high-fluoride levels in the water. So Made With Hope researched solutions for this and found other great organisations using rainwater harvesting systems to tackle both access to clean water, and getting water free from dangerous fluoride. Our successful rainwater harvesting pilot in 2018 has encouraged us to scale this project around rural communities in Arusha, Tanzania.

If you’re interested in learning more about the lessons we’ve learned so far, please don’t hesitate to contact us