FAQ
Why Do You Always Say "About" When Talking about Dollar Amounts?
In fact, when creating our budgets, we always work in the Ethiopian currency, which is called "birr". To most people, birr is an unfamiliar currency, and so for the sake of those reading our website, we approximate this into US dollars. In addition, the currency exchange rate between USD and Ethiopian birr has been known to fluctuate in the past. Despite this, we have decided that payments to our students and staff will always be calculated in birr, which means that they are able to incorporate a stable amount into their own household budgets and won't have to worry about international exchange rates when wondering what groceries to buy that month. We apologize to our readers for this inconvenience.
What is Your Charity Navigator Score?
We understand the appeal of sites like Charity Navigator. It's easy to see why people appreciate charity "ranking" sites like these: it's difficult to decide where your charitable donation should go and giving a charity a simple "score" makes it easy to choose. Unfortunately, this is a bad way to evaluate the quality of any non-profit organization. Sites like Charity Navigator focus on how much money is spent on programs versus how much money is spent on overhead. We believe that this does not paint an accurate picture of how good a charity actually is. A good charity should be judged on its effectiveness and its ability to provide benefit for those who need it.
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To put it in another way, imagine you need to hire a construction company to build a bridge. The first company has a nice office, with a good staff, and spends an appropriate amount on building materials. Their overhead and administration costs are large, so they would receive a bad score on a site like Charity Navigator. The second company boasts that they have low overhead and spend most of their funds on building materials. They don't have any computers in their office and their staff is working on a volunteer basis, but they're spending the same amount on building materials. The first company has a low Charity Navigator score, while the second one has a high Charity Navigator score, but which company would you hire? What kind of company would build a bridge safe enough to drive on?
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How Much Does MCO Really Spend on Administration and Overhead Costs?
In general, not much.
When it comes to budgets, we value our workers more than the administration. We may be the only organization in the world where the employees make more money than the bosses.
Our upper-level administration (Bryan, Beruk and Kevin) have never and will never take a salary.
The website costs are paid out-of-pocket by our upper-level administration. Website maintenance and design is done on a volunteer basis (again, by upper-level administration).
We do pay nominal fees for transferring money to Ethiopia. We also have to worry about the international currency exchange rate, which sometimes works in favor and sometimes does not.
Our mid-level managers, project staff, and social workers do receive fair salaries. These workers are all Ethiopian, living in Ethiopia, and receiving monthly salaries according to the Ethiopian market. As of December 2018, the total cost for all salaries being paid is less than $100 per month.
Can I Donate My Clothes/Books/Canned Food to the Children?
In short, no.
While we appreciate the intention of people who want to donate items to MCO, the cost used to ship these items to Ethiopia is usually more than the value of the items themselves. We pride ourselves on being extremely efficient with all of our funds, and we couldn't in good conscious spend $100 to ship a box of items whose value is less than $10.
We also advise you to never donate these items internationally for the same reason, and especially in the case of clothes, you may actually be hurting the local economy of the place you're donating to. Many developing countries still rely on the manufacturing and textile industries to support their economy, and a donation of a t-shirt brings down the costs of those same items being sold there, effectively taking money out of the pockets of the people you wish to help.