Why doesn’t Thankyou report ‘human impact figures’ anymore?

In our first decade, we only funded solutions that were easily tangible and quantifiable (most 'hardware'). We asked our partners to prove that they were building every well, filter, and health clinic because we could come up with an easily quantifiable people number based on how many people were using this hardware solution. In this pursuit, we became part of the problem that contributes to unsustainable or non-impactful solutions known as the donor dysfunction.

With our unrestricted funding approach, we’re committed to funding partners that are focused on delivering impact to communities living in extreme poverty, not projects (or easy-to-understand / quantifiable solutions). We know real change takes time, involves multiple stakeholders and cannot be reduced to just funding tangible solutions in the short term. In this new way forward, we are open to funding tangible AND more complex, systemic solutions. Because we are open to funding systemic solutions, which are harder to quantify (eg. a government influencing or advocacy program), we never want to over-claim or over-attribute our funding’s impact and for this reason, the amount of people WE have specifically helped is no longer a public claim we feel comfortable making. Rest assured, we still collect data on each of our partner’s organisational impact metrics which you can find over at www.thankyou.co/impact, and also the amount of people they serve and reach each year.