Nonprofit organizations such as ours have an ethical obligation to our constituents, donors, partners and beneficiaries to conduct ourselves with transparency and accountability. We began this project blog with the intent of keeping the public informed about our activities, accomplishments, decisions and so on. This is in keeping with our desire to build external transparency, public understanding and trust in our organization.
Village Diary is an initiative of the LINK-UP Charity Foundation, an NGO registered in the SW region of the Republic of Cameroon. We’re accountable to the government of Cameroon, but lack 501(c)3 tax exemption status in the United States and thus are not required to file IRS 990 tax returns. These reports are public information for those that know how to find them (on websites such as guidestar.org, for example). To make them more accessible, a best practice for nonprofits is to post them publicly on their blog, along with accounting audits, board activities, annual reports and related information.
As a foreign NGO lacking this special status, we’ve decided to take the lead among Cameroonian recipients of U.S. Embassy funding by making a full public disclosure of the recent financial assistance award granted to Village Diary. This includes the U.S. Department of State financial assistance award form, specifics of the award, correspondence between AfroVisioN Group and LINK-UP with the U.S. Embassy in Yaoundé, and a detailed costing of how the funds will be used for the project.
The amount of this award is US $10,503.39, and was granted for the purpose of providing seed money to launch Village Diary; specifically development of the IT platform, hardware to be used for fieldwork and web server hosting for one year. Details and conditions of the award are contained in the PDF document (below).
It should also be noted that our fundraising efforts were conducted entirely by volunteer staff. 100% of the funds granted in this award will go toward implementation of the Village Diary project, as detailed in our budget allocation.
Every nonprofit is a public trust working to produce something of benefit to the public, and the public is, in a very real sense, the ultimate shareholders of our organization—even more so than our board members, partners or staff.
We’re making these documents available as a single PDF download: federal-assistance-docs.pdf (1.37 MB). We feel it’s a positive step toward increasing transparency and accountability for our organization.
Questions, comments or other feedback are greatly appreciated.
Last week team members Bill Zimmerman and Fon Christopher Achobang met with staff from the 
The Village Diary is a new approach to securing the rights of inheritance for children and widows. By providing access to digital records of inheritance, social services and legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of society, we aim to help stop this cycle of poverty before it starts.