A $45 Million Gift Leaves Malala Fund Flush But Critics Question Where the Money Goes

For more than a decade, the Malala Fund has traded on a simple promise: Give, and a girl goes to school. This month, many have raised serious red flags over what donors are actually getting for their money.One post, which drew thousands of shares, accused the girls’ education charity of spending millions more than it raised while paying six-figure executive salaries. The replies went further, pointing to grants sent to London, first-class travel, and claimed results that no one outside the charity could verify.Others questioned why a charity so closely tied to Afghan girls was spending heavily on lobbying at the United Nations rather than funding the underground classrooms keeping some of them in school.The numbers in that first post were accurate. They were also a year old. So is the charity running out of money, or sitting on a fortune?The charity’s newest audited statements, issued September 25 and covering the 12 months through March 31, 2026, look very different. Total support and revenue jumped to about $63.5 million from roughly $16.5 million the year before. Net assets nearly doubled to $84.8 million. Auditors note that roughly 71 percent of that year’s support came from a single donor.The scrutiny sharpened after Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who co-founded the fund with her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, in 2013, met the duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, at Claridge’s at Mayfair on October 7. One X post pointed to the setting as evidence of a lavish lifestyle. Four days later, on International Day of the Girl, the duchess’s As Ever brand announced that net proceeds from its jams and teas would go to the fund.For supporters of the charity, the timing proved awkward. Photos of scones and tea at one of London’s most expensive hotels spread online alongside reports of Afghan clinics shutting down for want of a few thousand dollars. Underground schools there are barely hanging on.Others argued that a charity named after the world’s most famous schoolgirl should be able to say how many girls are in a classroom because of it, and what each one costs.The viral post drew its figures from the fund’s 2024 to 2025 tax return: $16.48 million in revenue, $23.34 million in expenses and $42.97 million in net assets. Those match, line for line, the audited results for the year ending March 2025. That was before the windfall arrived.A $45 Million Windfall From a Single DonorMost of the turnaround traces back to one check.The fund’s latest Form 990, signed September 28 by its new chief executive, Nabila Aguele, records one gift of $45 million and two others of about $3 million and $2.5 million. The public copy does not name the donors. An American billionaire philanthropist, MacKenzie Scott, has listed the Malala Fund among her recipients, though neither party has said whether she is behind the $45 million.Such dependence on one benefactor is rare among charities that rely on the public for support.“In terms of donor concentration, that is a large reliance on one donor that is not common among public charities,” the chairman in accounting at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, Brian Mittendorf, tells the Sun.The auditors say management does not expect a similar gift from this donor again and plans to spend it over several years. Financial assets available within a year totaled about $81.6 million at the end of March, nearly four times the $21.6 million the charity spent.“One large gift can double the balance sheet, but it also means the organization is exposed if that donor slows or stops,” a political strategist and the managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas tells The New York Sun. “Reserves at that level are unusually high for an advocacy-and-grantmaking group of this size.”The windfall also explains the deficits the post seized on. After a roughly $29 million surplus in the year ending March 2023, the fund ran deficits of $9.1 million and about $6.9 million over the next two years, drawing down that cushion.“Some donors give large gifts that are paid over several years. Accounting rules require us to count the full gift as income in the year it is promised, even though we spend it over the following years,” the fund says.Put simply, a big pledge hits the books all at once, even though the cash is spent slowly. That makes the charity look flush one year and in the red the next. Its five-year strategy commits $50 million in grants by 2030. With $9.8 million given out in the first year, about $40 million of that is still to come.Where the Program Dollars GoThe viral post from a podcaster, which set in motion a chain of critics raising concerns, also flagged $18.94 million in “program services,” a label many donors read as money spent on the cause. Under nonprofit accounting rules, it is not the same as money handed to schools. Program spending also covers salaries, consultants and travel for staff doing program work.So where does a dollar given to the Malala Fund actually go?Grants made up about 53 cents of every dollar spent in the year ending March 2025, and 55 cents in the latest year, when the fund gave $11.9 million out of $21.6 million in expenses. That includes $2.13 million to Malala Fund UK, a separately registered British affiliate. The fund says it gave the other $9.8 million to 43 partner organizations in nine countries.“A grant ratio in the mid-50s is not low for pure advocacy work, but it is low for an organization whose public brand is girls in school,” Mr. Thomas tells The New York Sun.“Transfers to a sister entity in London count as grants on the books even when they largely support payroll and operations there,” he adds. “That is legal, but it is not the same as money reaching frontline education providers.”In plain terms, nearly one in five grant dollars last year went to the fund’s own sister charity. That money pays for London staff and campaigns, as well as programs, but it isn’t the same as money for a local school or teacher.Not every analyst sees the shift as a problem. The fund has added sovereign debt reform and International Monetary Fund policy to its agenda, a move one observer says has drawn new money from donor-advised funds after donations fell for two years.“By shifting to a multi-issue, lobbying entity, they have attracted new money that can subsidize their grant work. If that is the cost of business to keep the original vision alive, I can’t say I disagree with this approach,” a global risk analyst, Dennis Santiago, tells the Sun.Much of the work is advocacy. The fund pays its staff and local partners to pressure governments for new laws and larger education budgets, rather than running schools itself.“We focus on this work because when a government changes a policy or a budget, it can help far more girls than any single school could,” the fund says.In Afghanistan, the Taliban have barred an estimated 2.4 million girls from secondary school since seizing power in 2021. The fund responds there largely through the United Nations.The fund says it has awarded $4.5 million to partners campaigning to codify “gender apartheid” as a crime against humanity over the Taliban’s ban on girls’ secondary schooling, and more than $3.75 million for online and alternative learning that gives over 16,000 Afghan girls access to secondary education. It credits that push with bringing 14 UN member states behind a bid to add gender apartheid to a crimes against humanity treaty, with negotiations set for January 2028, according to its annual report.Critics argue that direct spending on Afghan girls would do more to help them today. Even if the treaty is amended, it is unlikely to reopen a single classroom under the Taliban, they say, while underground schools and online classes get by on shoestring budgets.The fund’s evidence of success comes from its own accounts. Its claims that more than 16,000 Afghan girls are studying online with its support, and that 14 UN member states now back the treaty bid, appear in its own reporting, not in any independent review.The staff hired to check such claims have also left. The fund’s two monitoring and evaluation employees, whose job was to measure whether its grants actually work, both departed on December 6, 2024. The latest return shows the fund paid $547,500 to Delivery Associates, a London consultancy, for work tied to redesigning how it measures results.“I think it is very hard to credit specific policy wins to any advocacy charity’s specific work,” Mr. Mittendorf says.Mr. Thomas agrees.“Generic language like ‘capable of reaching’ or ‘partners reached’ is not the same as outcomes,” he says.In the end, it comes down to proof. The fund’s accounts have been audited by an outside firm, and they came back clean. Its impact is another matter. The millions of students reached, and the laws changed, are, for the most part, the fund’s own claims. Nobody outside the organization has counted how many girls are sitting in a classroom because of its grants.Mr. Santiago, however, takes a more forgiving view of the numbers.“Outcome and impact statements are expressions of the aspirations of an organization. They are what the grants could do if all of them were implemented in the most successful way possible,” he notes.Salaries, Consultants and First-Class TravelHow the fund pays its own people has drawn the sharpest fire online.The newest return shows Lena Alfi, then chief executive, earning $361,296 in reportable pay, plus $40,046 in other compensation, up from $257,921 two filings earlier. Twenty employees earned more than $100,000, out of a staff of 37.“CEO pay near $400,000 is toward the higher end for an education-focused nonprofit of this revenue scale,” Mr. Thomas says. “The share of staff above $100,000 and the rise in travel stand out more than just the CEO’s compensation.”Mr. Santiago explains that groups engaged in international lobbying, particularly around monetary policy, tend to pay salaries and perks in line with what the fund offers.“Is that the original charity that began long ago? No. But it may be the cost of doing business that keeps that charity alive. I don’t judge what they have to do to make it happen,” he observes.Not everyone sees it that way.Ms. Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban on her school bus in 2012. Donors who give in her name may assume their money pays for teachers and textbooks, not six-figure salaries at Washington and London. To critics, that divide between the story and the spending is the problem.The fund’s last four returns also disclose first-class or charter travel for officers or key employees. Travel spending rose about 38 percent in the latest audited year, to roughly $834,000.“That box on the 990 is ticked because our policy allows premium-class travel when it’s needed for security,” the fund explains.It adds that when Ms. Aguele took over, “the board reviewed CEO pay again and lowered it, in line with a newly developed pay scale.”The filings, however, do not say which officers or employees flew premium class, or how often. The fund points to security, which is a real concern for staff working on girls’ education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ms. Aguele, who ran the fund’s Nigeria operations before her appointment, took over on April 1.A Famous Name With a Light TouchThe woman whose name sells the cause has almost no hand in the spending. The filings list Ms. Yousafzai, now 29 and living in Britain, as an unpaid board member who gives the charity about an hour a week.“Malala and her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, are unpaid members of our board, as our 990 shows,” the fund confirms to the Sun. “Malala Fund does not pay for any of her personal travel or expenses; she covers those herself.”What is left is a charity built on one of the most recognized names in the world but run day to day by professional staff. It has a $45 million gift on its books, and the public can see what it spends but not what it achieves.For donors, the question is not whether the money is missing. It is whether the money is buying what Ms. Yousafzai’s name promises.That puts the onus on the fund’s board. It sets the chief executive’s pay and oversees spending policy, and Ms. Yousafzai and her father are among its members.“The most important safeguards are independent compensation benchmarking, a travel policy that is reviewed annually, and board members who are not family or long-time associates of the founder,” Mr. Thomas says.“Given the prominence of the organization, these spending practices may be justifiable,” Mr. Mittendorf adds. “But it is critical that the board be the party that makes such a determination and not the people who may benefit from it.”

A $45 Million Gift Leaves Malala Fund Flush But Critics Question Where the Money Goes

A $45 Million Gift Leaves Malala Fund Flush But Critics Question Where the Money Goes

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