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Funding

Beginning with a small grant of 14,000 rupees from Terre Des Hommes, CED has been financially supported for over 20 years by NGO donor agencies.

NOVIB; a Dutch development NGO, had been the principal donor for many years. During this time, users paid small amounts for various services and these have helped build up the reserves and corpus of the organization. Since 1998 however, CED has not received any major project grants. This source seems to have dried up at least for the basic documentation work, which CED does, and which impacts its users.

Given the uncertain nature of funding, CED needs to work out its financial model. Firstly it decided to reduce expenditure and increase efficiency. This has been successfully achieved. To give you an idea of the financial figures - our total programme expenditure has been brought down from 42.7 lakh rupees in 1996-97 to 26 lakh rupees, an absolute drop of 35% over four years. Personnel costs are a major portion of the expenses. It has been reduced from 19.7 lakh rupees in 1996-97 to 16.6 lakh rupees in 2000-01 - a drop of 13%. In terms of revenue generation, in the year 2000-01, CED was able to generate about 19% of its revenue expenditure from its services and another 35% from returns from its corpus.

We have also been forced to compromise on our basic infrastructure, including the serviceability and maintenance of hardware, equipment and furniture. Also, we have cut down heavily on buying books and other publications. We have reduced travel, planning and work meetings. It is this situation that we are approaching you to come forward and support CED.

To give you an idea of the financial figures: our total programme expenditure has been brought down from 42.7 lakh rupees (93,343 USD) in 1996-97 to 27.7 lakh rupees (61,555 USD) in 1998-99 and further to 26 lakh rupees (57,777 USD), an absolute drop of 35% over four years. Personnel costs are a major portion of the expenses. It has been reduced from 19.7 lakh rupees in 1996-97 to 17.1 lakh rupees in 1998-99 to 16.6 lakh rupees in 2000-01 - a drop of 13%. Our expenditure on fixed costs i.e. equipment like computers and xerox machines which was 6.5 lakh rupees in 1996-67 cut to 3 lakh rupees in 1998-99 and 2.1 lakh rupees in 2000-01 - a drop of 68%. Therefore most of the critical equipment needs to be refurbished or replaced soon.

In the year 2000-01, CED was able to generate about 19% of its annual revenue expenditure from its services and another 35% from returns from its corpus. We have no commitment of project grants as yet for the current financial year and are facing a huge deficit and increasing depletion of our reserves. We therefore urge you to bridge our budgetary gap though donations, and increase in the use of our services.

In order to sustain its activities, CED needs to build up its corpus, while generating more revenue from its services and project work. The Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, which has scrutinized our work and our financial situation, feels that CED will be sustainable if its corpus is raised by 100 lakhs. It has therefore offered to grant a corpus of fifty lakh rupees, provided we raise a similar amount from other sources over three years.