(Photo from Fa3elKheirEgypt.com )
Although there is a constant need for charitable giving, many small organisations struggle to get sufficient funds for their causes. A new website, Fa3elKheirEgypt.com, aims to solve this problem and increase the visibility of small charities to a wider audience.
Ramadan is the main season for charitable giving in Egypt; millions are spent each year on advertisements for charity organisations that are expected to reel in millions more.
The big name charities that can afford to spend money are unsurprisingly the ones that get the most donations, and while the work many of them do is invaluable, it means viewers do not have all the information they need when donating, creating a big money gap between different organisations.
Fa3elKheirEgypt.com was created to address this problem, and it aims to provide well-intentioned Egyptians with the information they need to put their money where they feel will have the most impact.
“A good way to describe what we do is a ‘yellow pages’ for charities. We want to be as comprehensive as possible so people can make informed decisions,” said Aquila Abdel Rahim, who co-founded Fa3elKheirEgypt with Alyaa Shedeed.
The website categorises charities by cause and kinds of cases; “you have health, orphans, education, other, etc. and under each of those sub categories. Under each you find specific cases that are provided by the organisations.”
The cases include the initials of the person in need, their age, how much they need, why they need it and the last four numbers of their national ID number, something Abdel Rahim says may comfort some people.
“It is completely within your right to make sure this is a real case by contacting the organisation and authenticating it yourself,” Abdel Rahim says, adding: “The cases are provided by the organisations and the money by people, we are just the middle man.”
She says the website was created wholly through volunteer efforts: “not a single penny so far has been spent on Fa3elKheirEgypt.”
Despite the self-sufficiency of the website, the initiative required a lot of effort to contact and gain the trust of the organisations: “we always need more volunteers, and compiling the cases was very difficult for two people. The biggest challenge was getting these organisations to trust us with this information,” she said.
The same organisations now provide one of Fa3elKheirEgypt’s unique services: a section on their homepage that gives their visitors the most urgent cases at a glance.
There are plans to further expand Fa3elKheirEgypt in several ways: “we want to include the number of cases that have been helped on our home page so we can encourage others to help more, she said.
The co-founder added that they hope to expand into other countries as well. “We want to contact organisations in other areas that need attention and include geographical hot zones that need relief outside of Egypt.”
This article is published well after Ramadan and can serve as a reminder for all of us that good deeds should never be tied down to a time period and may it help prove that we can give just as much attention all year long if given the right information.
