The Fifth Estate

Finding School No 4 - WE Charity Donor Deception in Kenya (47x6)

: 18, 2021

Mark Kelley and I are sitting in the back of a taxi in Nairobi, Kenya, when we suddenly receive urgent texts, followed quickly by phone calls, from the CBC office in Toronto. The Fifth Estate’s Executive producer Diana Swain tells us she has just received an official document from the Ministry of the Interior of Kenya, dated Sept. 13, 2021, and stamped “Assistant County Commissioner.” The letter contained unfounded allegations that Mark, our camera crew and I had committed crimes while filming our documentary about the Canadian-based WE Charity’s projects in Narok County, Kenya. For some reason, the letter was cc’d to the WE organization. The letter claims we trespassed on government property, a “criminal offence” in Kenya. Fearing for our safety, Diana tells us to immediately head to the airport. CBC’s security team has instructed us to check in every 20 minutes until we are out of the country. How did it come to this? Along with other news organizations, The Fifth Estate began looking into WE Charity in the summer of 2020 after the Trudeau government awarded the organization a controversial contract to manage a $500-million volunteer grant program for students. This spring, our research turned to the charity’s overseas projects. For years, WE Charity had been asking kids across North America to raise money for its schoolhouse projects overseas. We had what we thought was a simple question. Did the number of donations that WE Charity collected in North America from children and wealthy philanthropists to build badly needed schoolhouses in rural Kenya match up with the actual number of schoolhouses that were constructed? Getting the answer proved to be far more difficult than we might have imagined. WE Charity would not provide us that information, citing privacy concerns. So we built our own spreadsheets and combed through publicly available information to find out how many donors were told they had fully funded classrooms. We