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Our accountability to our sponsors
Here are 4 ways we are committed to honouring your trust as a sponsor
To change the world. To give back. To be part of the solution. To share the love.
Whatever your reason for sponsoring a child, one thing is certain – you want to be sure that your financial support is making a difference for the children who need it most.
We do too! World Vision has a culture of accountability; our financial integrity is core to who we are and what we do. World Vision is committed to transparently and responsibly managing the funds entrusted to us. That’s why we do not tolerate corruption and have rigorous processes in place to fight mismanagement and misuse of resources at all levels.
Want to know more? Here are four ways we are committed to honouring your trust as a sponsor through strong financial accountability.
1. We are stewards
World Vision has more than 2.5 million sponsors worldwide who trust us with their financial support to help make a difference in the world for children. It’s a big responsibility, and for more than 70 years, we have worked hard to use the resources entrusted to us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Our focus is to deliver maximum impact to the children and communities that we serve, and this commitment is also rooted in our Christian faith and core values.
More than 80% of the money and resources received by World Vision is spent on field programmes for children and their communities. The remainder funds our staff, office and administration costs, including fundraising to enable us to continue and extend our work with support from sponsors and other donors. It also includes work to monitor and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our programmes, and to protect the people who benefit from our programmes.
READ MORE: How donations are spent
2. We are transparent and accountable
World Vision adheres to the highest standards of financial accountability, following accepted practices for transparency by providing an annual Impact Report, financial statements and donation breakdowns, as well as a regular Accountability Report. Each country office and area programme is also accountable through a range of internal and external audits, programme quality reviews and reporting procedures.
In addition, we are proud members of initiatives such as Accountable Now and the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), and we adhere to the Global Standard for CSO accountability and the Institute of Internal Auditors’ requirements and standards. In our last review, we received the top level of conformance rating, which “demonstrates a clear intent and commitment to achieving the Core Principles for the Professional Practice of Internal Auditing and the Definition of Internal Auditing.”
3. We have checks and balances in place
World Vision has policies and procedures in place to ensure that we responsibly and transparently manage our resources. To make sure that corruption and fraud is prevented and can be quickly detected, we have a number of processes in place, which include:
- Thorough background checks on staff
- Management systems that prevent any individual from having exclusive rights to spend large amounts of money
- Mandatory training for staff in area programmes, country offices and support offices, to detect and deter fraud
- A global whistle blower hotline known as the Integrity & Protection Hotline so that staff or those outside the organisation can report suspicious behaviour
- World Vision staff who monitor and visit programmes and coordinate audits of programme finance to ensure that funds are properly used
- A range of internal and external audit and programme quality review procedures for programmes and country offices
- Reports sent to the donors who help fund our work, the governments and authorities in the places where we operate, and to our industry peers
- External and independent audits of our financial statements, as well as annual reports prepared to internationally acknowledged standards of transparency for not-for-profits.
We also work hard to protect against the misuse of resources by proactively working to identify financial irregularities and investigate them. As well as making sure we pick up potential issues as early as possible, this also means we are able to minimise any losses, find the person(s) responsible, strengthen our internal controls and systems, and deter others from misconduct.
4. We encourage reporting of suspicious behaviour
World Vision is committed to conducting operations and programmes that are ethical, legal and consistent with our values and mission.
Our Programme Accountability Framework outlines our approach to collecting and acting on feedback and complaints in our area programmes where sponsored child live, and this includes a commitment to making sure communities know about their right to give feedback and make complaints and how to do that. Safeguarding concerns can be emailed to World Vision International here and any misconduct by World Vision staff or our affiliates can be reported through our global whistle-blower hotline known as the Integrity and Protection Hotline.
We are committed to responding to feedback and complaints and investigating allegations. When faced with an incident involving fraud, we take appropriate disciplinary action against the person(s) involved, up to and including termination and referral to authorities.
When you sponsor a child through World Vision, you can be confident that your contributions are making the difference you intended.
As our trusted partner, who makes our work for children possible, this is our commitment to you:
We promise to provide information for, listen to, and empower all those connected with our work to actively participate and to hold us to account. We commit to accept responsibility for our decisions, disclose the results in a transparent manner and uphold the highest ethical behaviour in our operations.