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An education charity run by basketball star Yao Ming received a huge donation today, which
it will use to build three schools in rural parts of the country. Wu Yina has more.
The Yao Foundation received the five-million-yuan donation from Mariott hotels. Over the next
three years, the money will be used to build three Project Hope schools in southwestern
China and support the Yao Foundation Hope Primary School basketball program.
"Primary education in rural China, we think is valuable and important. And it had to be
transparent. We need to know the money we are rasing was going towards obviously the
end result, and it needed also to be measured and audited. So transparency was critical,"
said Simon Cooper.
Yao Ming told ICS that to achieve transparency, every yuan the foundation spends is checked
by the China Youth Development Foundation and audited by volunteers from PWC. However,
running a famous charity foundation does have its difficulties.
"We did have some bottlenecks, which came from managment, government regulations, and operations. Our
management cost is very high, because there is no standard or regulation to judge those
charity organizations in society. People can only run it through mutual trust, there's
no possibility for us to develop bigger. So I hope officials can set clear standards so
that we can operate better," said Yao.
Since it was set up in 2008, the Yao Foundation has funded 15 Hope Primary schools, providing
classrooms for more than 9,000 rural children.