Our most recent fiscal year (ending Sept 30, 2017) saw a 71.8% increase in our overall revenue from $31,300 to $53,788. This was welcome growth, but is slightly misleading, so I’ll break it down a bit.
Click here to view our FY 2016/17 financials in detail.
$5,000 of the growth comes from in-kind donations. These are essentially airplane tickets for our team, which are paid by the individual and not donors. We categorize these airplane ticket purchases as revenue because they are the equivalent of a donation to the organization and are tax-deductible for the volunteer. In fiscal years we travel to Ghana more frequently, or have larger teams making the journey, the in-kind donations increase. This is what happened in FY 2016/17.
Another revenue line item I’d like to draw attention to is Grants. In 2016/17 we received a one-time $10,000 donation from a foundation. We hope this relationship continues, as this gift was vital to our programming, and we are working to expand this relationship. We also received a one-time $2,500 Grant from Silicon Valley Bank, which runs a small grants program.
Finally, click here to view a breakdown of our revenue by monthly donors vs one-time expenses. You can also see that 91% of our overall expenses were spent on our programs in Ghana, while 9% was spent on administrative costs.
The last year also saw a 174% increase in our expenditures. This was due to:
- Higher monthly program expenses. FY 2016/17 was our first year with 47 Kekeli Women, the most recent 17 of whom were trained in Q1 of FY2016/17. The Kekeli Program, being our major program/intervention, makes up the bulk of our expenses year in and year out and we expect these increased program expenses to continue in FY 2017/18.
- Taking two trips within the fiscal year (Nov 2016 and Aug 2017). Trips are always our most expensive line items due to the extensive trainings we run while in Ghana. The trip budget for FY 2017/18 is not expected to exceed half of the total from last year.
Looking forward, in FY2017/18 we expect similar numbers overall to FY2016/17. Certainly our hope is that our revenue comes in above $50K again. Our expenses will likely decrease a bit, simply because we don’t expect to take two trips as we did last year.
However, from this point forward we are committed to maintaining the program with 47 Kekeli Women (with hopeful expansion in 2 years time). Given we provide ongoing training to the women on a regular basis (every 2 months) and provide stipends for their work, we’ve set a target of $55,000 in revenue for FY 2017/18.
