Facing backlash, KONY 2012 goes public with budget
The group behind a viral video viewed 40 million times puts its finances online.
'Invisible children’, the charity behind the viral social media phenomenon "KONY 2012", has revealed details of its finances and the allocations of its budget on its website.
Joseph Kony is a Ugandan despot, responsible for recruiting child soldiers and killing millions of people in civil war-ravaged central Africa and the Congo.
Invisible children is a US based charity which has its primary aim the removal of Kony, by maintaining a US military presence in Uganda. It strives to increase global awareness of the situation with the Lords Resistance Army, the guerrilla groups which Kony lords over and recruits child soldiers into.
A video clip produced by the group (above) has been viewed more than 40 million times.
The voluntary disclosure of its financial details was in response to recent criticism of the charity's operations. Among these are accusations that the charity spends only a small fraction of its income on direct actions in Africa.
Primarily these accusations are sourced from a blog by Canadian political science student Grant Oyston going viral, which was highly critical of the Kony 2012 charity and its methods of operation.
The graphs on the Invisible Children site contradict that accusation by showing pie charts allocating only 16% to management costs, with the remainder divided between various direct actions such as “awareness programs” and “Central Africa programs”.
Stephen Allely
Fri, 09 Mar 2012
Fri, 09 Mar 2012
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Facing backlash, KONY 2012 goes public with budget
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