Fund an outcome,
not a hope.
Most animal-welfare giving buys activity: a number of surgeries, a number of camps. What it rarely buys is the ability to say afterwards whether the population actually changed. That is a measurement problem, and it is fixable.
Activity is easy to buy. Change is not.
Sterilisation only reduces a population if it clears a coverage threshold in a defined area. Below that threshold the animals you treat are replaced faster than you treat them, and the money produces real welfare benefit for individual dogs but no population effect at all. Both outcomes get reported the same way: as a count of surgeries.
The distinction requires knowing the denominator — how many animals are in the area — and being able to check coverage afterwards. Neither is available for most of India today, which is why so much sincere funding cannot demonstrate what it achieved.
A question, a partner, and a finish line.
You bring an objective and a geography. We turn it into a scoped question with a real denominator — or, where none exists, a baseline study to establish one first.
Unit costs are published and sourced, not quoted. You see the arithmetic: animals, rate, duration, field teams, before anything is committed.
A named local organisation does the fieldwork. StrayPaw supplies the study design, the data tooling and the record layer — we do not compete with the people doing the work.
Outcomes post to the animal records as they happen. At the end you get coverage measured against the baseline, not a count of activity.
A number you could defend to an auditor.
Every figure in a StrayPaw programme carries its source, its year and its confidence. Where a number does not exist, the register says so rather than estimating — because a plan built on an invented denominator is not a plan. That honesty is the point: it is what makes the numbers that are there worth trusting.
Population, coverage and unit cost each cite a published origin and year.
Ward-level geography where it exists; an explicit share of a state where it does not.
Outcomes tie to the animals your funding actually reached.