As you might already know, we are currently prioritizing fund-raising for Child Need Africa’s medical clinic in Uganda, since that project urgently requires a permanent support project to generate the income that will be necessary for the clinic to afford medicine and qualified staff in the long run. Once the clinic has a balanced budget again, however, we wanted to return our attention to the extension project for the Green Village in Burundi.

In the interest of transparency, we want to inform you that there have been some developments within the Burundian NPO Green Life, who runs the Green Village, that we want to see resolved before we prioritize them again in our fund-raising efforts.

We have now learned that a little over a month after our last transfer of €10, 422 of the first batch of four of the extension project for the Green Village on November 13, 2013, seven of its members voiced complaints over the command structure within Green Life, which they perceived as nontransparent and as a means of excluding them from decision-making. They pressed for legal action against the four members they perceived as being in charge of the day-to-day operations of Green Life, but a preliminary consultation found that they had no legal basis for their claims. Our contact person, the head of Green Life, John Barutwanayo, told us that these seven members were rarely active in the organization, and that it was merely due to their absence from key meetings that various decisions were made without them.

We can’t take sides in this conflict, but as a partner organization we require Green Life to operate stabily. They sent all the receipts and many photos to prove that they invested all the donations into the project, but their effectiveness hinges on their long-term sustainability. They need to continue and expand their operations for many more years to warrant all our investments, and we want to be sure that this incident does not degrade their stability and potential before we prioritize them again.