The first year of «basmati - authentic help» is about to end. 2008 has been a turbulent year, for us and for the world. We’ve learned quite a lot in this time. Being in the role of a promoter and bridge builder in the first place, we soon found ourselves in a different situation. We realised that we must become more to our projects, our donors.
«basmati - authentic help» is an officially acclaimed non-profit organisation exempted from taxes. This allows us to forward any donation to its destination without loss. Although we usually feature projects that are enabled to receive international donations and – even more - recognise the fact that donating includes an emotional value for the donors, there are plenty of obstacles:
Small donations cause disproportionately high transaction fees.
- Although we welcome payments on PayPal, yet we are getting charged – twice (transaction fee and conversion fee).
- Bank transfers are complicated (easy to handle systems like IBAN only exists in Europe).
- Issuing donation confirmations equals paperwork equals loss of efficiency. For some projects it’s even impossible to issue official donation receipts due to legal reasons.
As we will be collecting your donations and sending them batched we tear down these obstacles and increase the efficiency of your donation. Having basmati collecting your donations means:
Reduce unnecessary costs: Ten small donations means ten times the transaction fee. A single donation of basmati, however causes costs exactly once – and since these costs are taken over by ourselves, the full amount of your donation goes to the project.
- Flawless, automatic confirmation: basmati provides a confirmation for each donation (from 100 CHF) which can be used for tax purposes.
- Your donation is your donation: Name and address of a donor will of course be passed on to the projects. The contact between donor and recipient is guaranteed.
- Transparency and Overview: The aggregate donations will be documented and reported in the annual report.
Still, you are free to chose whether you want to donate directly to a project or do that through «basmati – authentic help».
Important: If you donate to us, please indicate which projects you would like to support – and don’t forget to tell us your name, full address and e-mail.


















