Funding
According to the annual accounts, its total budget is of €4,000,000, which is mostly financed by sale of photo-albums (of which the authors freely grant copyright, and which are freely distributed by the Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne, or NMPP), as well as extras such as T-shirts, etc.
More than 20% of its funding comes from private groups, such as Sanofi-Aventis (€400,000, 10% of its budget), François Pinault, the Fondation de France, the Open Society Institute of George Soros, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, Benetton, or the Center for a Free Cuba (which donated €64,000 in 2002). Furthermore, Saatchi & Saatchi has created various communication campaigns of RWB for free (for instance, concerning censorship in Algeria).
Funding (12% of total in 2007) also comes from governmental organisations. According to RWB president Robert Ménard, the donations from the French government account for 4.8% of RWB's budget; the total amount of governmental aid being 11% of its budget (including money from the French government, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, UNESCO and the Organisation internationale de la francophonie). Daniel Junqua, the vice-president of the French section of RWB (and also vice-president of the NGO Les Amis du Monde diplomatique), states that funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, a branch of the U.S. State Department does not compromise RWB's impartiality. RWB's Chinese website credits support from Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, a quasi-government organization funded by the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Reporters Without Borders books are sold by the French leisure chains and supermarkets Fnac, Carrefour, Casino, Monoprix and Cora, the websites alapage.com, fnac.com and amazon.fr, as well as A2Presse and over 300 bookshops throughout France.
Journalist Salim Lamrani has estimated that RWB would have to sell 170,200 books in 2004 and 188,400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2 million in the organisation's income statement. In fact, Reporters Without Borders book sales were 230,000 in 2007.
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