Why a bus fare is the program, not an expense

There is a habit in charity budgeting of treating some costs as the real work and others as regrettable logistics. Coaching is the program. Transport is overhead. Meals are overhead. A chaperone is overhead.

Run it once and that ordering collapses. A girl in Kapilvastu is nine to eleven hours by road from Kathmandu. The coaching she would receive there is free to her. The journey is not, and neither is the guesthouse bed she needs for five nights, or the adult who has to travel with her for her to be allowed to go at all. Take away the $282 line and the $1,007 line, and she does not attend. The coaching is still there. She is not in the room.

The same holds for food. Lunch and two tea breaks for around sixty people over four days is the largest single line in the Nepal clinic's Category C at $1,047, and it is not a nicety. A four-day training day runs from morning futsal to afternoon classroom. Nobody learns machine literacy hungry, and expecting families to send a child with four days of meals is a quiet way of selecting for the families who can.

This is why we itemize the way we do. When transport, lodging, food and chaperoning sit in a line called "overhead", the first thing a squeezed budget cuts is the thing that decides who gets to participate. When they sit in the budget under their own names, with their own prices, cutting them is a visible decision about who is excluded.

We would rather make that decision in public, or better, not have to make it because someone funded the line.