FAQ

Nourish Bangladesh is NOT affiliated with Carleton College. Although this campaign started with a number of students and a professor from Carleton College, it has now grown to include non-Carleton volunteers and the college is neither officially nor unofficially backing this website.

We know that donors often find it difficult to decide who to trust with their donations, especially when sending money to a country far away and with well-documented cases of widespread corruption and fraud. Donating to established NGOs may not always be ideal, given the large overhead costs these institutions may incur. In other words, donors rightly worry that a significant fraction (upwards of 30% even) of their donation may never reach the benefactors.

On the other hand, trusting grassroots volunteer groups can be difficult without verifiable accounts of their activities on the ground, since they are not registered institutions (e.g. a registered NGO) and do not have a significant footprint on the web or other media. Although bred from good intentions, some inexperienced volunteer initiatives may also have a difficult time optimizing how much to spend on food relief for each household and what to include in a relief package.

There are real trade-offs here, as spending more than the optimal amounts of funds to help one household can come at the expense of less funds available for other households, something that is very important to keep in mind when funds are limited as is the case in Bangladesh. Then there is also the question of targeted relief: are the recipients geographically distributed to areas that have the highest needs, or is it simply based on regions that the institution has prior experience with?

Non-governmental Organizations that are registered for 501(3)(c) with the Internal Revenue Service in the United States can offer tax deductions to the donors i.e. you can use this donation as a tax deduction when filing for taxes. Usually, bigger NGOs are registered while the smaller ones and grassroots volunteer groups are not – it requires considerable money, effort, and time to do so, and especially under the current circumstances, it can be hard for them to register for the 501(3)(c). Click on Donate for a detailed comparison between the two options.

Our longer term vision is to simplify fundraising initiatives for international students and grassroots fundraisers like ourselves who are interested in helping a foreign country (perhaps their country of origin) with disaster relief. 

To this end, we will record, generate, and make public documents, blogs, and vlogs about best practices, lessons learned, and resources available for fundraising. We know that individuals who are far away from a place they care about can find it difficult to fundraise efficiently and send it to the right actors when a disaster strikes. Organizing initiatives requires time and effort that can make a project turnaround difficult if not impossible. So, we hope to advise nascent fundraisers about the best possible ways to fundraise and then effectively disburse the funds to help mitigate the sufferings they wish to address. Currently, we do not have plans for future fundraising endeavours beyond this initiative; instead we would like to help others with similar projects elsewhere, and provide guidance on how to raise funds legitimately and efficiently.

Of course! It’s not as hard as it sounds! Spread the words, talk to your families and friends who might also be interested, and see if you can get three donations, any amounts. While sharing our website on your social media definitely helps, sometimes it’s the personal reaching out to others and explaining what we do that makes the difference. If you want to fundraise on our behalf and would like to understand in more details what it is that we do, please send us an email at nourishbangladesh.us@gmail.com

The Portfolio is a list of NGOs and grassroots volunteer groups that have been vetted by Nourish Bangladesh. It includes both types of NGOs: those that offer tax deductions in the US and those that do not. It also includes local grassroots volunteer groups that spontaneously come together during disasters to fundraise and help those in need. Volunteer groups are usually convened and led by a team leader and as such are not registered with the government in Bangladesh or the USA. They often work as an independent unit but sometimes work as contractors for established NGOs. Most successful volunteer groups in Bangladesh, also more likely to be vetted by us, have a history of helping out during disasters – coming together during disasters and disbanding afterwards. The volunteers are a diverse mixture of youth and adults from different occupations. They tend to have very little overhead costs compared to established NGOs, although it is usually not zero as you have to account for transportation costs and such.

Our research suggests that there is no such thing as the best NGO or volunteer group. Trust that we have a healthy appetite for generating quantitative scales that reduces multidimensional measures into a single rank ordered scale. But we strongly believe that such an attempt would be misguided. Every rank reducing algorithm has certain assumptions about reducibility which we are quite certain does not apply here. In simple terms, we believe that all NGOs and volunteers have their strengths and weaknesses. Based on our preliminary research, we have reached the conclusion that given our objective of fighting hunger amidst the COVID19 pandemic, bigger NGOs tend to be low risk, low pay-off options while the smaller NGOs and grassroot volunteer groups tend to be higher risk, higher pay-off options. Thus, after vetting each organization, we intend to split your donations between the different NGOs and grassroots volunteer groups. 

To understand the impact that Covid-19 is having on Bangladesh, it is important to recognize that Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated places in the world. The country is only about the size of Iowa, but it has a population of 160 million people. 

Bangladesh has long struggled with poverty, making it extremely susceptible to infectious disease. The country’s public health system has only 432 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds for the entire population, with an additional 737 beds in private hospitals. Distribution is also uneven, as nearly 70% of these are in the Dhaka division.

As of May 31, 2020, Bangladesh reported 47,153 confirmed cases of Covid-19 within its borders and 650 deaths from the disease. The available data is likely very incomplete due to relatively low rates of testing.

More than the disease itself, however, the broader impacts of the pandemic have been particularly severe in Bangladesh. The economic situation was already precarious for a lot of people: only 15% of the country’s population make over $6 a day, and 87% of work is limited to the informal sector. 

Many in Bangladesh were already unable to feed their families, and the sudden and sharp drop in economic activity leaves millions more without enough income to feed their families.

Any tips that you pay GoFundMe does not help our campaign directly. So we do not particularly encourage or discourage donating to GoFundMe.