Donations in Kind
Medical Surplus
Section titled “Medical Surplus”There are organisations, particularly in the USA, that donate surplus medical equipment. This is often not worthwhile for Whisper. For consumables it’s essential that their “use by” dates are far enough in the future to comply with the standards set by the Ugandan government, otherwise they cannot be imported and they will be disposed of at considerable expense to Whisper.
Advance Fee Fraud
Section titled “Advance Fee Fraud”Treat large offers of donations in kind with caution. There have been advance fee scams where a donor offers a large donation in kind and proposes to ship it through a fake freight agent. The fake freight agent then sends an invoice to the charity for import duties, and the donation is never sent. It’s usually obvious from the freight agent’s website that they are fake.
A donor who makes a donation in kind would normally be expected to pay any relevant import duties themselves. The size of a donation would not be a reason to make an exception to this. The taxes can be calculated in advance as described here.
Sending Parcels to Uganda
Section titled “Sending Parcels to Uganda”In the UK there are now many low-cost resellers of DHL’s parcel service to Uganda; DHL even has their own discount service https://www.ipostparcels.com. Their service normally takes 3 days.
It may be more convenient to send items to Whisper volunteers to take out in their luggage.
In Uganda, postal services and couriers don’t normally deliver to people’s houses. Parcels must be collected from a depot, in Whisper’s case normally a post office or (for DHL) the DHL office in Jinja. DHL will phone and/or send an e-mail to Whisper when the parcel arrives; they may misspell the e-mail address, so for clarity use mixed case, e.g. veronika@WhisperHealth.org.