Building Secondary Schools in Rural Cambodia

GlobalGiving notes on comments:

The Cambodia Project appears in Guidestar as an organization in good standing with the IRS. It DOES NOT have a Form 990 on record, although all 501(c)3 orgs are required to submit a 990. We made the organization aware of this and they are addressing the problem. The expense reports submitted to GlobalGiving suggest that AT MOST 39% of the money raised by this organization have been spent in Cambodia in 2008. This is a much smaller fraction getting to the ground than virtually all other organizations on our website.

After extensive inquiries, I (working at GlobalGiving) believe the line item in this organization’s due diligence titled “Cambodia Operations” represented expenses accrued during their planning and fact-finding visits, which to me sounds like overhead and not program expenses. Consequently, the only non-overhead expenses this organization has accrued are partial expense reimbursements to volunteers who provided teacher training at a Cambodian college in the summer of 2008, leading to an overhead estimate consistent with “90%” some commenters have claimed.

Thus, we have decided to remove The Cambodia Project from GlobalGiving until it can provide documentation of actual services being delivered to people in Cambodia. When you – the donor- can fly there and walk through a village and see children learning in a school, then this organization will be allowed to reapply to GlobalGiving to join our online marketplace.

Now YOU MUST DECIDE what we will do with this money. You have received an email from jshirley@globalgiving.org asking you whether you (a) STILL want to give your donation to The Cambodia Project in spite of these allegations, or (b) want to give it to any other project on our site (via the GlobalGiving 100% satisfaction guarantee). If you do not reply by Monday, September 14, 2009,, we will redirect your donation to a worthy project through the GlobalGiving Fund (www.globalgiving.com/554).