ActionAid is an international non-governmental organization whose primary aim is to work against poverty and injustice worldwide.
ActionAid was founded in 1972 by Cecil Jackson-Cole as a child sponsorship charity (originally called Action in Distress) when 88 UK supporters sponsored 88 children in India and Kenya, the primary focus being on providing children with an education. Today its head office is located in South Africa with hubs in Asia, The Americas and Europe. The charity has received negative attention for its fundraising practices.
Video ActionAid
ActionAid made India's first Bollywood film focusing on AIDS, Ek Alag Mausam, a love story involving HIV positive people, based on a script by playwright Mahesh Dattani.
ActionAid also supported Shyam Benegal's film, Samar, which is based on the book Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives by Harsh Mander. The film raises issues about Dalits.
Maps ActionAid
Criticism
Charity Navigator recorded that in 2012 ActionAid USA had a high cost of fund raising (24%), with 53% of income spent on projects. This was also reported in an International Business Times article in October 2014, which noted that the "accounting processes the charity uses resulted in its administrative costs appearing to be 'particularly high' in the fiscal year ending 2012, the timeframe Charity Navigator relied on when calculating its current Charity Navigator score." Charity Navigator reports that for 2013 the cost of fundraising for ActionAid USA was much lower (9.4%), with 82.4% of income spent on projects.
ActionAid has been criticized for spreading unsupported claims and "grotesque" pictures of adverse effects from consumption of some genetically engineered crops in Africa, in particular the unsupported claim of genetically engineered crops causing tumors and cancer. The organization apologized for their misleading actions in 2015, after publication in the media.
ActionAid, who had supported coffee growing in 2000 and had earlier openly agitated against the democratically elected Haitian government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is with a number of other NGOs, strongly criticized for supporting the US backed coup that removed this, the first democratically elected president of Haiti in 2004, a coup which is described as "perhaps the most successful act of imperial sabotage since the end of the Cold War".
See also
- Target Poverty
References
Further reading
- Brown, Lalage. Preparing the Future-Women, Literacy, and Development. Web ActionAid, 1990. March 2012.
- Ahmed, F & Werker, E. What do Non-governmental Organizations Do? Web Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2007. March 2012
- ActionAid. End Poverty Together. Web. March 2012
- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. ActionAid (South Africa). Web 2012. March 2012
External links
- Official website
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