The ‘WaterAid’ Test for the Legitimacy of Charities

Posted on | November 29, 2009 | No Comments

I was cold-called late last week by a very polite young man seeking a regular monthly donation to WaterAid, the charity that seeks to provide safe water, effective sanitation and hygiene education to some of the poorest parts of the world. Whether or not I chose to donate to the charity is my business, but I am in no doubt whatsoever that WaterAid is an entirely worthy cause, and one that fully deserved its 2006 accolade of Britain’s Most Admired Charity.

Just a £15 donation each month for one year is enough to rehabilitate a borehole with a pump in Zambia, for instance, providing clean accessible water for up to 250 people.

Reading David Mitchell’s piece in this week’s Observer – Why my old school ties no longer bind – I could not help but reflect on the contrast between deserving charities and utterly undeserving charities.

WaterAid is a deserving charity – no one but the most churlish and mean-spirited among us would consider the provision of clean water to poor communities around the world in any other light.

Expensive independent schools drawing considerable monetary benefits from the status accorded them by the Charity Commission and the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator simply cannot be considered as legitimate by any measure of charity that I have ever understood. Even the provision of a few token bursaries each year makes no difference whatsoever to the legitimacy of their claim. This year alone, more than £100m of our money (around £5m in Scotland) will remain in the coffers of private schools, money that would otherwise find its way to the Exchequer or to local government in the form of rates.

As Mitchell writes, mentioning his Alma Mater and his own academic middle-class family background in the context of the massive increases in school fees since he attended the school in the late 1980s:

It’s pretty dismal, I know, that it takes the exclusion of families like my own to bring home to me the iniquities that have always existed in the private education system and there’s no reason why the state educated should give a damn about any of this. It’s a quantitative, not a qualitative, change – but still surely a regrettable one.

Provincial minor public schools like Abingdon have stopped making the educational equivalent of a high-end but affordable family estate car and started turning out Bentleys. There must be a market for these more luxurious teaching services, as most private schools seem to be doing OK from their new business plan, but there’s no escaping the fact that they’ve followed the market, not the need.

That’s not how charities are supposed to behave.

How should we distinguish, then, between deserving charities and undeserving charities (i.e. non-charities!)?

My suggestion would be to deploy what I will call the WaterAid Test. Imagine being cold-called by an organization claiming to be a charity. If it’s an organization such as WaterAid, where there can be no doubting the legitimacy of their attempts to garner donations for what is a highly deserving cause, they have the right to be seen as a charity. If, on the other hand, a private school were to cold-call you, seeking a charitable donation (“just £15 a month will ensure that at least one rugger pitch will have clear line-markings all year round”) the claim for legitimacy disappears.

The £100m per annum could be put to much better use!

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