Practical Philanthropy: Alex Chapman of Ethiopiaid

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Below is a transcript of Lyn Tomlinson and Alex Chapman's conversation. 

Podcast transcript

Lyn Tomlinson
Welcome to ‘Practical Philanthropy’, with me, Lyn Tomlinson, the podcast where inspirational people share their experience of giving their time, their skills, or money to help others. As Head of Impact at Cazenove Capital, I help people who want to do good, do just that. Whether that's through how they allocate their investment capital or through their charitable giving, and I'm absolutely obsessed with getting people who are thinking about giving their wealth away or investing for impact, get stuck in and get going. Today you'll hear from Alex Chapman, who is chair of Ethiopiaid and a trustee of the Reed Foundation.

Ethiopiaid has grown over 30 years from a family foundation into one that is primarily funded by their fundraising efforts and the public. During that 30 years, and under the guidance of Sir Alec Reed and his daughter Alex, Ethiopiaid has granted over 70 million to partners in Ethiopia. And I'm really excited and grateful to have Alex with me today because she has such a wealth of experience and knowledge that we can all learn from. And I have a million questions for her, such as how do you find, fund and build relationships with grassroots organisations in a country which is over 5000 miles away? How do you gain their trust and understand what they need from you in order to deliver programmes that can deliver great outcomes for the people that you are trying to help? And how do you even identify what those people need in the first place?

But before we get into that, Alex, welcome to Practical Philanthropy.

Alex Chapman
Thank you, Lyn. Thank you for inviting me to take part in this podcast. It's an honour to have this opportunity to talk about international giving, which is a subject I'm really passionate about.

Lyn Tomlinson
Fantastic. And before we get into the details of that, can you just tell me how you introduce yourself if you're at an awful networking event and someone's siddles up to you and asks you what you do?

Alex Chapman
Well, interestingly, I probably wouldn't describe myself as a philanthropist. I'm probably more likely to say I work in the charity sector or I'm a fundraiser or grant maker. I think I think of my father more as a philanthropist because he's given significant amounts to charity and he's founded the Reed Foundation and various other charities. But I do believe I'm continuing to building on his legacy, maybe on a smaller scale and less public. But I think philanthropy is very individual and there are lots of different ways of doing it. So, yes, perhaps I should inhabit that identity more and say I am a philanthropist.

Lyn Tomlinson
It’s actually such a grand word, isn't it? That it’s just really meant to describe the desire to give back and help other people, isn't it? I did think about whether we should call this podcast ‘Practical Philanthropy’ because most people, like you say, like yourselves, just don't think of themselves as philanthropists. So, thank you for that.
And what about your professional life, what you did in your professional life, as well as your charitable giving?

Alex Chapman
So, originally I worked in television, in documentary filmmaking, and more recently, I have retrained as a counsellor.

Lyn Tomlinson
Amazing. Have you bought any of that professional experience into your philanthropy, like the film-making side or the documentary side?

Alex Chapman
Yes, definitely. I've worked on several documentaries internationally. One in Uganda about refugees fleeing Uganda because they're LGBT, and they're trying to bring in the death penalty there. And also in Ethiopia, I’ve made some short films there as well.

Lyn Tomlinson
Yes, perhaps we'll cover that a bit more when we talk about this enormous gap between local and international giving, which I know you'll give us some great insight on. So some of the people that are going to listen to you today will be drawn by the desire to give internationally, but they're probably wondering, just where on earth do you start? So, can you tell us about those earlier years and why the family specifically decided to fund that specific country?

Alex Chapman
Yes, I guess my father was a very successful entrepreneur. He came from a fairly humble background, so when he was successful and made a lot of money, he wanted to give something back. And it was during the 1980s when there was the terrible famine in Ethiopia, and it was in the news a lot, and he met an Ethiopian woman, Jimba Tafara, in London, and she was actually a wonderful fundraiser and had her own charity in Addis Ababa, and she persuaded him to visit the projects, which was quite extraordinary, really. He'd never travelled outside Europe. I'm amazed she managed to persuade him, but he and my mother went out there in the 80’s, and I think when he first thought he was going, he would be able to offer some of his business experience. But when he arrived, he was so shocked by the level of poverty that he realised a sort of longer term solution was needed and it was really a kind of awakening. And when he came back to the UK, soon after he came back, he founded Ethiopiaid.

Lyn Tomlinson
I want to take a moment to hone in on something really important that Alex has just said. Quite often people think that philanthropy has to be incredibly strategic, that you need to have a plan. And whilst that's certainly helpful, time and time again we see some really great work come out of going with the flow, of being inspired by one individual, like Gamba Tafara, or being made aware of an issue on the media which just grabs you and makes you think, I've just got to do something about this.
Here Alex talks about the family's journey to Ethiopiaid today, which began by her father being inspired and made aware of the issues in Ethiopia and him stepping way out of his comfort zone into an area he knew nothing about, but with a really open mind. And this is something that I'd really encourage people to do - to follow your gut sometimes, to find out more, as you never know what direction it will take you in.

Lyn Tomlinson
So when he arrived, obviously you mentioned that he was just shocked by the extent of the poverty. So how have you, as an organisation, gone about focusing and working out where your money or the money that you raise can really make a big difference in that country?

Alex Chapman
I think we've always focused very much on tangible results. So, I mean, the very first intervention he did on a personal level before he founded Ethiopiade, was he noticed in Addis Ababa there was a lot of sewage just running through the streets and children playing in it. So the very first intervention was to buy a big suction truck- it literally went and sucked the sewage out of the streets. And so it was a very sort of practical intervention with a very sort of tangible result. And in some ways, a lot of our projects are very like that. We may train midwives, where it's very, again, a very tangible result for your funds, you know, that you can train so many people to become midwives or, another project we support street children's breakfast. So, again, it's very obvious how many breakfast your funds can pay for. So I think in a country like Ethiopian, working from such a distance, that increases our impact, and makes the results much more obvious, I guess.

Lyn Tomlinson
And how do you find those particular partners? Is that something you do on your own or how does that work, practically? Do you work with any of the largest INGO’s, or the big international charities? How does that work?

Alex Chapman
There's sort of various routes, really. I mean, in times of humanitarian crisis, we often do partner with other bigger INGOS. But we tend to try and find small grassroots organisations we can work with. And we do that through various means. We have a small grants programme where we invite small local grassroots organisations to apply for funding up to 20,000. They're small grants. And these are often very tiny organisations that may not have had international funding before. And that's a really good way for us to test out how good they are at delivering programmes, how easy they are to work with, how transparent and how well they are at reporting. And through that, we have now got four or five longer term partners that we've discovered through that route. We also take referrals from other charities and maybe in country, when we're visiting, we might get a suggestion or recommendation from the British Council, British Embassy or other NGOs saying, you should go and look at this work, this is really excellent. And then we do a kind of field visit to see if we feel that we could work together and that we have similar values.

Lyn Tomlinson
Yes, you mention that these are tiny organisations, but they have these enormous ambitions. I was reading about some of them on the Ethiopiaid website. And what struck me is that the leaders of those organisations really want to be the best in the country delivering those programmes. How do you identify that brilliant leadership, or is it just really obvious when you come across it?

Alex Chapman
Yes, I mean, I think leadership is absolutely key to have someone who has the skills and passion to run some of these organisations. But we do also do a lot of work to build capacity. So the local NGOs we're working with, we will invest in trying to strengthen their management or financial management, their ability to monitor and evaluate. And I think that's key to help organisations become fit for funding, we call it, so that other funders will be attracted to them, so it won't just be us supporting themto make them sustainable, they need other funders. So that's an important part of our work.

Lyn Tomlinson
And that's quite innovative, isn't it? That style of financing, that capacity building. Is that something that you've done over the 30 years of Ethiopiaid or has that been relatively more recent?

Alex Chapman
I think that's been relatively more recent, but what we've always done is offered unrestricted funding. So a lot of funders want to fund a particular project and obviously some projects are a lot more attractive to funders than others. But there's all the boring jobs that also need to be funded, like the administrative assistant, or someone to pay for the office cleaning. Different very sort of boring things that funders are not interested in. And of course, for an organisation to be sustainable and to carry on running projects continuously, they need some unrestricted funding as well. So we have been willing to give that as well. And I think our partners really appreciate that.

Lyn Tomlinson
Alex has just described here something that we would really encourage people to do, and that's to provide unrestricted funding. As she has talked about, this means letting the organisation you are funding use your money on whatever they need it for. If you're finding yourself in a situation where perhaps you don't want to provide unrestricted funding to an organisation, it's a really good time to just pause and ask yourself this question. And that's ‘what is stopping you?’

Perhaps there is something you're unsure of within the team or in the delivery of the projects and therefore maybe you haven't found the right charity partner. One option here, rather than to walk away and not to fund, is to give the organisation a smaller amount of funding initially and just see how they get on with it.

Lyn Tomlinson
And that's a really important point, isn't it? Because I think one of the challenges I hear from clients is that, particularly with the large international charities, is that they worry about how much money spent on, like you say, the fundraising or keeping the organisation going. And are there any sort of best practises around that in terms of what people should be looking for or whether it has gone beyond what should be reasonable, or is that very difficult? Is it dependent on each charity?

Alex Chapman
I'd always be conscious, if I was looking to support a charity, to see how many pence in the pound is spent on fundraising. I'm biased, of course, but I do think that small or medium sized charities, the gap, I guess, between the donor and the beneficiary is smaller - there are less layers of kind of hierarchy and bureaucracy and less money wasted. You can be more agile as a smaller organisation and you can certainly respond to crisis quicker. I mean, we had a situation last year where one of our partners in Afar, it was a terrible kind of swarm of locusts, an infestation, which was affecting the crops. And our partner appealed for funds and we were able to send funds out within a week, while she told us that she was, three or four months later, still waiting to hear back from the larger agencies. Certainly there are benefits from working with smaller organisations.

Lyn Tomlinson
Yeah. And I think that's a really interesting point, because it's that responsiveness, isn't it, that you really need in those times of crisis or, at any time. So if we think about the likes of Ethiopiaid, and other foundations like yours, do you think they fill that gap? Because if you're where you are, where you are where you've sort of established effectively a business around philanthropy - you raise funds every year. But if you're not in that situation, like, maybe you're just starting out either as a family or an individual, and you want to give in an area that's quite challenging, either because of distance or perhaps knowledge, but you don't want to fund through those larger charities because it just feels like a big black hole. Even if they're doing great work, it's just that there's a big distance. Is that something that you think foundations such as yours and others, that they fill that gap?

Alex Chapman
Yes, definitely. I think they're a good sort of conduit, because if you're starting out and you don't have the expertise in country, it can be very daunting and you can easily make mistakes. So I think to get some advice, Ethiopiaid have been working in Ethiopia for 30 years, so we have good contacts and a lot of experience. You could possibly start up your own foundation and hire in expertise, but I definitely feel to begin with, you need that support to make sure you're funding the right projects and the money is going to have the greatest impact and to mitigate risk.

Lyn Tomlinson
And could you, without sort of names, just give us an example of people that are funding you as an organisation, work that you do with them and perhaps how you communicate with them, actually, to let them know what the great work you're doing?

Alex Chapman
I think we're very approachable as an organisation and we have very close links with our major donors. We invite them to Ethiopia and many of them do come out and see the work first-hand, which I think is really key. We listen to them, how much they want to be communicated with. I mean, some donors like to be very very closely involved in the projects. Others like to keep it at an arm's length, but likes to receive a report from time to time to know that they know their money is being well spent. So I guess it's very bespoke to the donors' needs.

Lyn Tomlinson
And can we talk about this, which we touched on at the beginning, this public awareness piece. Because one of the things that we wanted to solve for, one of the objectives of having this podcast is that we really wanted to raise awareness of areas of philanthropy that are really underfunded.

So there's great statistics around the environment. For example, there's less than 2% of funding globally goes towards climate philanthropy, even though it's so important to so many people. So could you tell us a little bit about the sort of gap that you see in funding for the likes of Ethiopia? And we saw this with them, with the floods in Pakistan versus the potential outpouring of donations that you see towards Ukraine and the Notre Dame, for example.

Alex Chapman
Yeah, I mean it's very difficult, but I guess it's understandable. The media plays a big role in this, and obviously there's been very little media about what's going on in Ethiopia. I mean, I think the British public generally have very little idea of the extent of displacement and food insecurity in northern Ethiopia. And that's partly because the Ethiopian government itself had a media blackout. So it was very difficult to get any sort of independent stories out of that region. But the media in the UK didn't really pick up on it at all. I mean, Channel Four and The Guardian did run some articles, but it was very limited. And I think that's partly also due to kind of personal connection that obviously people in the UK feel much closer to Ukraine. The idea of war in Europe, that it could escalate. People may have family or friends that have taken in Ukrainian refugees. So it feels much more on the doorstep and there's much more of a sort of personal connection. But I guess my frustration is the world is becoming increasingly a smaller place and things that are happening in other places, you know, the huge impact of climate change, the massive displacement of millions of people is, you know, on our doorstep already and going to increasingly be so.

And there's so much disparity in the world that I think we all need to do more to help with the situation.

Lyn Tomlinson
And you mentioned that you'd made the documentary about the Ugandan refugees. Is that something that you think you have a role to do with your background in documentary making? Is that something that you've done as part of Ethipiaid to raise that awareness? Because I know with the Netflix documentaries around biodiversity and climate- they've been quite helpful, I think, in raising that awareness.

It sounds like such an easy thing to say, but is that very difficult thing to do, to get on the news real, as it were?

Alex Chapman
Yes, definitely. I think it's hard to get things commissioned. But I think what we do at Ethiopiaid in any way we can, is to amplify voices of the people we work with, whether that's through documentary film, through interviews, letters we write. In any way we can, we try to amplify their voices so that there's more awareness of what's going on there.

Lyn Tomlinson
Do you think the barrier is more about the complexity of giving in these far flung places or a lack of awareness?

Alex Chapman
I think it's probably a little bit of both. Obviously it's much harder. Ethiopia is over 5000 miles away. A lot of people here won't have direct connections there. It's interesting that a lot of our donors have got some kind of association with Ethiopia- they may have lived there as a child, they may have been there on holiday, they may be a medic who's worked there. So there’s usually quite a personal connection. So, yes, I think it probably is a little bit of both.

Lyn Tomlinson
What makes a good donor, Alex?

Alex Chapman
I would say all donors are good. They come in many different guises, but they're all good because they're actually donating.

I think being a good donor is very much about listening, interestingly. When I go to Ethiopia and visit projects, I think it's really important to listen and for there to be a kind of respect between the funder and the project. And it's really interesting what you can glean from asking lots of questions and listening. And then I would also advise donors who wanted to support an organisation like Ethiopiaid to do their research, to look up a charity on the charity commission, to look at their accounts, see how much they have in reserve, see how sustainable the organisation is, and then ask to maybe go and talk to key people in the organisation, the CEO, even some of the trustees, to really glean if their values are similar and if the work is exactly what they want to support and if they're good at delivering.

And then a good donor, I guess, from an organization's point of view, is someone who is maybe willing to take risks a little bit and willing to be agile and maybe willing to fund things that not everyone else is rushing to fund.

Lyn Tomlinson
So, final question then. What's the one piece of advice that you wish someone had given you when you were first starting out? Or what's the one thing that you'd love someone listening to you today to take away, to help them as they go on their [philanthropic] journey?

Alex Chapman
Yeah, I think when I first started out, I was quite reticent or a bit shy about stepping into philanthropy. So I guess my advice would be to other people who are beginning their journey is to be as proactive as you can, really, and to start some conversations, because it's a great opportunity to make a difference. You've got the potential to transform people's lives and in so doing, expand your own knowledge and horizons. And I certainly, my life has been so much richer thanks to the people I've met and the projects I've been involved in in Ethiopia. And, yeah, I'd encourage other people to give it a go.

Lyn Tomlinson
Fantastic. That's the perfect ending. So, well, thank you so much for your time and your insights and your candour. It's been absolutely brilliant listening to you. I've learned an awful lot and I'm sure our listeners have. And so, finally, where can our audience follow the brilliant work that you're doing? Is it online? Where's the best place to go?

Alex Chapman
Yes, well, we've got a fantastic website, www.ethiopiad.org.uk. You can always follow us on Twitter, Instagram, or if anyone wants to email me directly, I'm very happy to hear from you. My email is Alexandra@ethiopiaid.org.uk.

Lyn Tomlinson
Brilliant.

Alex Chapman
Thank you ever so much.

Lyn Tomlinson
One of the things I love most about what Alex had to say to us today was just hearing how much philanthropy has brought to her personally and how much better her life has been because of the work that she's done within her charitable giving.

I was also really struck by this concept of getting organisations, what she calls fit, for funding, i.e. To provide initial funding to very small organisations and help them strengthen their team so that they can then go on to raise further funding from larger organisations. And this so called capacity building is a really innovative approach to philanthropy, which, as you can hear, has brought Ethiopiaid so much success through their small grants programme. And we're going to cover how you go about making small grants to small charities in more detail on a later podcast, so do look out for that. And finally, thank you so much for listening to our first podcast on giving. If you have any questions on philanthropy or impact investing, you can reach me on LinkedIn or at Lyn.Tomlinson@cazenovecapital.com.

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