Every contribution we receive and every payment we make is published, broken down by programme, with the period it covers. This page explains how that is done, why it is done that way, and what we do on the fairly regular occasions when we do not have a figure.
Why costs and not impact
The sector’s usual unit of reporting is the transformed life. Lives changed, futures secured, communities empowered. Anybody who has read a few of these knows that they are unfalsifiable, and donors have learned to discount them accordingly, which is a rational response to language that cannot be checked.
A cost can be checked. A deposit paid on a room is a specific amount on a specific date. A term of school fees for a specific number of children is a number somebody can add up. Six counselling sessions has a price and that price is either right or wrong. None of it is inspiring and all of it is verifiable, and we would rather be dull and checkable.
There is a second reason, which is internal. A cost that has to be named and published gets argued about inside the organisation before it is spent. Vague spending survives vague reporting. It does not survive a line item.
What gets published
For each of the six programmes, and for each reporting period:
- Money in, by source type. Individual giving, organisational giving, grants, and gifts in kind valued at what they would have cost us to buy.
- Money out, by category within the programme. Accommodation nights, deposits, guarantor commitments, fees, transport, medical costs, legal costs, wages of the people delivering it.
- What it went on, described in ordinary language rather than accounting categories, so that “casework support” does not quietly cover four unrelated things.
- What is left, and whether it is committed to something already agreed or genuinely unspent.
- Running costs, separately and honestly, including the share of them each programme carries.
Running costs are the line most organisations bury and they are the one we most want people to look at, because a service with no administration is a service that loses documents, misses court dates and forgets to call somebody back.
What never gets published
Anything that could identify a woman we have helped. Not a name, not an initial, not a photograph, not a story, not the town, not the number of children, not the combination of details that identifies somebody to the one person who is looking for her.
This is stricter than it needs to be under the law and it is deliberate. A story can be de-identified thoroughly enough to satisfy a lawyer and still be instantly recognisable to the man who lived it. He is the only reader who matters when making that judgement.
So a funder receives the record of what a programme paid for. They do not receive the person. That rule has lost us money and we are keeping it. What we hold and why we hold so little covers the same principle from the other end.
When we do not have a number
This is where most transparency claims quietly fail, because the honest answer to “how much did that cost” is sometimes “we have not worked it out yet”.
Where a figure is not available, it is marked as missing. Not estimated, not projected, not filled with a plausible number from a similar organisation. Missing, with a note saying what is missing and when we expect to have it.
You will therefore see placeholders in our reporting and on parts of this site. They are not an oversight. A visible gap is a working reminder, and a gap that has been filled with an estimate is indistinguishable from a fact within about a week, including to us.
The same rule applies to the numbers organisations like ours are most tempted by: women supported, nights provided, cases closed. Where we have not counted something properly we do not publish a number for it.
How to read it critically
A few questions are worth asking of our reporting, and of anybody else’s.
- Does money in and money out reconcile, including what is carried over? If it does not, something is in the wrong period or in the wrong programme.
- Are running costs shown at all? A charity claiming that every naira reaches the beneficiary is either mistaken or is hiding the overhead somewhere else.
- Do unit costs move? A cost per night that never changes is a cost nobody is recalculating.
- Are gifts in kind valued at what they would have cost, or at what the donor said they were worth? Those are different numbers and the second one is usually larger.
- Is anything described so generally that it could be anything? That is the line to ask about.
If a figure does not make sense to you, write and ask, and we will explain it or correct it. Questions about the accounts are answered by the people who keep them rather than by anybody whose job is fundraising.
What this costs us
Publishing at this level of detail is slower than not doing it, and it invites arguments about individual lines that a summary would have avoided.
It also removes some fundraising options. We cannot run an appeal built on a named woman’s story. We cannot claim an impact figure we have not measured. We cannot say that a fixed amount rescues a person, because that sentence is not true of anything we do, and the honest version, which is that a woman’s first year costs a variable amount depending on children, housing, health and legal need, does not fit on a poster.
We think the trade is worth it, mostly because the alternative asks people to trust an organisation on the basis of language that any organisation could write.
If you fund a programme
You get the record of what it paid for, in the same detail we keep for ourselves, for the period your money covered. You get told if the money went somewhere other than where you intended, and why, before the report rather than in it.
You do not get the name, the photograph or the story of anybody it helped. Those belong to her, and the work itself is the thing being funded.
Questions people ask
Where do I find the actual figures?
They are published by programme and by period on our reporting page. Where a figure has not been finalised it is marked as missing rather than estimated.
Why are some numbers missing?
Because we have not worked them out yet. An estimate becomes indistinguishable from a fact very quickly, so we leave the gap visible until the real number exists.
Can I fund one specific programme?
Yes, and you receive the record for that programme and that period. If circumstances mean the money is better used elsewhere, we ask you first.
Will you tell me who my donation helped?
No. Not a name, a photograph or a story, at any level of giving. That rule has cost us funding and it is not negotiable.
How much does it cost to help one woman?
It varies enormously depending on children, housing, health and legal need, and we will not publish an averaged figure that reads as a price. The programme costs are published instead.
A figure in your report looks wrong. Who do I ask?
Write to us and the people who keep the accounts will answer. If it is wrong we correct it and say that we have.
If you need help now
If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, call or send a message to +2348025170267, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.
Before you rely on anything on this page
We publish these articles so that you can understand a subject and work out what to ask for. They are written carefully and in good faith. They are still general information about how things usually work, and not advice about your situation, which we do not know.
- This is not legal advice.
- We are not a law firm. Criminal law in Nigeria is largely a state matter, the VAPP Act applies in a state only if that state adopted it, and statutory, customary and Islamic marriages are governed by different law and different courts. Two people with the same facts can have genuinely different options. Get advice from a lawyer who practises where you live — and if cost is the obstacle, ask us, because arranging that is part of what we do.
- This is not medical advice.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces being examined. Do not delay seeing a doctor, nurse or pharmacist because of something you read here, and do not start, stop or change any treatment on the strength of it. If something is time critical, go and be seen.
- This is not counselling, and it is not financial advice.
- Articles about trauma, sleep, money, debt, renting or starting a business describe what commonly helps. They are not therapy and they are not a recommendation about your own money. Speak to a counsellor, a qualified adviser or your own bank about your circumstances.
- It may be out of date, or wrong for where you are.
- Law changes, services close, numbers stop answering and practice varies by state. We correct what we find, and we cannot promise that every page is current on the day you read it. Where we do not have something confirmed, we say so rather than fill the gap.
- Reading this does not make us your lawyer or your doctor.
- No professional relationship is created by reading an article, and we cannot accept liability for decisions taken on the strength of one. What we can do is help you reach somebody who is qualified to advise you, which is what the legal and health parts of our work exist for.
- We cannot promise an outcome, and we cannot make anybody safe.
- A protection order is a piece of paper backed by an enforcement system that is inconsistent. A plan works until the day it does not. Anybody in this field promising safety is selling something, and the promise itself is dangerous because it stops people planning.
Do not let this notice stop you acting. If you are in immediate danger, call 112. If something is medically urgent, go to a hospital — you do not need a police report to be treated. And if you do not know where to start, that is a normal way to begin: use the contact page and we will take it from there.
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