From the collector's bucket to the rice bowl

A coin is thrown into a bucket. The money goes to a charity, which charters a plane. The plane is loaded with medicine, food and water and flown to Indonesia. The cargo is driven to someone who is sick, hungry and thirsty.

A simple story. One that is not always true of charitable donations, which can be diluted by the costs involved in distribution. But in the case of the millions given to the tsunami aid appeal in the last fortnight, the overheads have been kept to a minimum. And the money trail can be followed in its simplicity from British pockets to disaster zones in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The other day, villagers of Hawkinge in Kent were roused by knocking at their doors. On the step were Brendan-James or "BJ" Smith, 7, and his 5-year-old twin brothers Spencer and Harrison, who were collecting anything their neighbours could spare for boys and girls left homeless, orphaned and destitute.

The buckets filled. Over two days, trudging from door to door in the driving rain, the brothers raised £435 ($1170).

"The boys just said: 'Can't we do something to help?"' said their mother, Alison Smith.

Yesterday they were at it again.

The money will follow an extremely efficient financial path from the buckets through Save the Children fundraising teams and the banks to hurriedly hired cargo planes and on to the Indian Ocean.

Over the weekend and the next few days, Save the Children, Oxfam and the British Government are flying hundreds of tons of new aid to Aceh in Sumatra and Sri Lanka.

Save the Children has two cargo planes flying out to Aceh this week. The first, a DC8 hired at a cost of US$185,000 ($266,000), left from East Midlands airport carrying 30 tons of aid yesterday. Its contents told their own story: tarpaulins for 15,000 families; rubber ground sheets; generators; large storage tents; 500 mosquito nets; 1.5 tons of children's clothing; and three tons of children's food supplements. The cost of this flight is being met by a private donor.

Today, a huge Russian Antonov cargo plane will carry 10 heavy-duty trucks and all-terrain vehicles for distributing aid. The Government has promised to meet the cost of many aid flights and the charity is hoping it will do so in this case.

Save the Children is already in Aceh, alongside Oxfam and many other agencies, delivering food and essential survival kits.

Aid agencies are used to sudden but short-lived surges of public generosity. The response to the tsunami disaster has been different - very many more spontaneous acts of generosity, like that of the Smith brothers, coupled with a sustained level of commitment.

Donations have run at an average of £10 million a day for two weeks, and money is still arriving. Save the Children anticipates two very large private donations that could lift its own total from £1 million to £1.5 million this week.

The peak in donations came on Thursday, December 30 - the day the Smith boys decided to go door to door. This followed television appeals and warnings from the World Health Organisation that the disaster had made five million people destitute.

The scale of the public reaction has exposed one link of the chain to greater scrutiny than normal - the fees taken by banks and credit card companies to process donations.

Normally, credit card companies can trim off 1 to 3 per cent as a fee for each transaction - a charge that reportedly brought in £300,000 before the companies agreed, under intense pressure, to waive their charges.

The charities are trying to get the same deal from money transfer companies such as Western Union and MoneyGram, which are being used heavily to send money home to stricken relatives by Sri Lankans, Indonesians and Indians living abroad. Those negotiations, however, are proving more difficult.

Faced with embarrassing questions about the amount of money that could be trimmed off from donations, the Disasters Emergency Committee, the powerful co-ordinating body for the UK's 12 largest aid charities, has come down hard.

In the past, as much as 6p in the pound was taken off by charities for office costs and expenses.

But the committee announced late last week, "to dispel any doubts", that it was imposing a strict ceiling on the administration fees allowed.

Fundraising costs were limited to an "absolute maximum" of 2 per cent, with another 1 per cent going towards official monitoring and evaluation of how the money was spent.

It added: "On average, 98p out of every pound goes straight on emergency relief aid."

- INDEPENDENT