Rikolto is committed to clearly and transparently communicating with all our partners and donors on how we spend our resources. We make our information accessible through:
Clear programme descriptions on our website.
Commitment to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and compliance with its reporting standards: on our website you can find an overview of the activity files for each country.
We adhere to the sustainability guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative in our annual reporting.
Our financial section in this annual report gives a clear overview of resources and expenses for all our programmes.
Apart from the above, Rikolto endorses the Donor Bill of Rights, and we work with the following initiatives on transparency and accountability in Belgium: Belgian Association for Ethical Fundraising, Donorinfo.be (a private initiative), Goede Doelen (King Baudoin Foundation) and X-Bank (Belgian NGO-federation). These websites publish Rikolto Belgium vzw’s audited figures. In this annual report, we also show you the consolidated figures for the worldwide Rikolto group (Rikolto Belgium vzw and Rikolto International s.o.n). As accountability, transparency and qualitative reporting are key to Rikolto, checking adherence to global financial reporting standards and quality control will continue to be the responsibility of the Global Finance Support Team.
Rikolto uses personal contact data for administrative purposes and to inform people about our activities. We take the privacy of our donors very seriously and want to be 100% transparent about what we do with personal data. In 2019, we continued working on transparent workflows. We started a privacy taskforce to look at possible data breaches and ways to upgrade our data management to ensure compliance with the European privacy legislation (GDPR).
We did not receive any formal complaints in 2019.
Since 2018, we have had a clear internal policy to manage the ethical risks associated with partnering with and receiving funds from companies, corporate foundations and government actors. Moreover, in 2019 our International Board of Directors approved an organisation-wide Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct. The aim of the Code of Ethics and the Code of Conduct is to help us to make informed decisions in response to the ethical dilemmas that we all face at work, to promote an ethical culture throughout the organisation and to show what we stand for as Rikolto members. These shared values and principles apply to all employees, volunteers, interns and third-party entities such as consultants, partners and donors.