WE Charity misled donors about building schools in Kenya, records show

Marc and Craig Kielburger's WE Charity routinely misled school-aged children and wealthy philanthropists across North America for years as it solicited millions for schoolhouses in Kenya and other projects in its Adopt-A-Village program, an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found.

Slick marketing videos, congratulatory social media posts and crowdfunding websites across the internet tell the story of two brothers on a mission to change the world, but under closer scrutiny those digital crumbs lead down a trail of contradictions and deception. 

"I don't know how they thought they could get away with it for so long," said a former WE employee. CBC agreed to conceal their identity because they were concerned about legal reprisals from the charity for speaking out. 

Years after Rukshan de Silva and his high school classmates in Oakville, Ont., raised money for WE to build a one-room schoolhouse in Kenya, he travelled there to see the fruits of their labour. 

What he didn't know during his 2013 visit was that four small blue letters displayed prominently above the schoolhouse doorway were a clue that he and the students from Iroquois Ridge High School had been deceived. 

In fact, the letters were a dedication to another group which, online records show, indicated that they, too, had fully funded the schoolhouse.

WE Charity, then known as Free the Children, had collected donations to build two schools. Instead, they built one and told both donors they had paid for it. 

 "We were told that would be Iroquois Ridge's school that we had funded," de Silva said.

The charity was present in classrooms across North America, in part through its Brick by Brick program. School-aged children were recruited to collect small donations from friends and acquaintances — $20 bricks, 500 of which would build a school in an impoverished country.

Now, a months-long Fifth Estate investigation into WE Charity's Kenyan operations reveals that far fewer schools were built than were funded by donors, a fact that leaked internal WE documents show was co-ordinated at the highest levels of the organization.

There was "a strategic decision by senior leaders" to deliberately overfund projects, a former WE employee said. 

The deception resulted in multiple donor groups paying for the same schoolhouses many times over. 

WE denies it has misled donors.

The "claims that multiple donors funded the same school" is "false," WE said a letter to The Fifth Estate.