GoFundMe Denies Fee Waivers For Somali Drought.
A severe drought threatens millions of people in Somalia.
It’s the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with more than 20 million people in four countries at risk of starvation, Stephen O’Brien, the UN humanitarian chief, told the UN Security Council on Friday.
Members of the Somali diaspora took to crowdfunding platforms in order to fundraise for victims of the drought.
“We’re a bunch of students that came together once we saw the problem, and it really touched our hearts.” Adam took to GoFundMe to fundraise, within the first 10 days, his campaign helped raise over $60,000.
“We chose GoFundMe because people were familiar with it,” Adam said.
“However, they did take $5,715 out of the $66,150 that we’ve raised.” GoFundMe charges a 5 percent platform fee and 2.9 percent (plus, $0.30) payment processing, a total of 7.9 percent per donation.
Somali Faces, an online platform set up to share stories of Somali people from around the world, created a petition to influence GoFundMe to waive the transaction fees.
The petition reads, “In this time of dire need, we request GoFundMe to show support and let 100 percent of donations directly benefit the drought victims in the Horn of Africa.” “We contacted them and asked if they could waive those fees, but they said they can’t,” Mohammed Shire, co-founder of Somali Faces, said.
“Since this is a huge crises we are hoping for GoFundMe to waive those fees given that, in the past, they’ve already waived these fees.” Previously, the crowdfunding platform gave a $100,000 donation, which amounted to the waiver of their transaction fees, to the Orlando shooting GoFundMe campaign.