You can listen to the audio for last nights RSA event with HRH Duke of Edinburgh and Sir David Attenborough now.
Forward to 32 minutes in for a classic.
One of the great difficulties of the WWF was, it had a very good story so it raised an enormous amount of money. And then suddenly we thought, what about some projects? Well, the money was coming in much faster than we could turn out the projects. So we built it up…why aren’t we spending the money, wait-a-minute we can’t produce the projects. And we started throwing money at projects and people said “What are you doing with the money”, so we had to discover some means of tracing what was going on and making sure that people didn’t walk off with it because aid programmes, as you probably know, the money very seldom gets to the people who need it. So, I remember, we made a rule that we were not going to give any money to any projects, if they needed jeeps or landrovers or radios or whatever, we’d pay for that, we’d pay for people, their wages, but we would not give them any money to spend, and that worked quite well.
I got hold of a brilliant chief accountant and I said “How can we follow the way this money is being spent” and he said, “well, do you want to do it a hundred percent because it would be very very expensive.” And I thought well, yes, probably true, we’ve got to admit that there’s going to be leakage somewhere. It was quite interesting – because you don’t want to spend two hundred pounds or two thousand pounds chasing five bob, you know, it’s going in the wrong direction, and that’s what happens in the civil service.
Now go back and listen to the whole thing or watch the video: