Making it count

Christian Aid operates mainly through local organisations. Experience tells us they know best how to tackle the poverty they see every day, respond during emergencies and challenge their governments.

The £43.6 million/€46.9 million we gave to more than 600 partners in 2008/09 made us one of the UK’s largest grant-making organisations.

Sunshine futures

Eighty per cent of the £94.2 million/€101.4 million we spent in 2008/09 went directly on our work to end poverty and injustice – so that people such as Kadia Doumbia and her friends and family can have the chance of a decent life.

Climate change is making it increasingly difficult to grown food where Kadia lives in Mali, so she and her neighbours need to make the most of every penny. That’s why she eagerly signed up for evening classes in reading, writing and arithmetic.

These were possible because our partner Mali Folke-centre installed rooftop solar panels at a community centre to provide light at night, when the day’s work is over.
‘Now I can calculate the right prices for my crops when I sell them. My life has been better since I’ve been going to these classes,’ she says.
Grants to our partners made up 46% of the year’s total expenditure.

Emergency appeals

In 2008/09, we launched new emergency appeals to which you donated £16.8 million/€18.1 million, with a further £0.5 million/€0.5 million raised through Gift Aid on these donations.

The most dramatic emergency was when Cyclone Nargis hit Burma in May 2008 killing more than 140,000 homes and severely affecting 2.4 million more.

As we already had partners in the region, we were unusual among aid agencies in this particularly closed area, politically, to be able to respond quickly, delivering food, medicines, clothing and clean water to thousands in ten immediate aftermath.

Using your donations, our partners have since been working to help nearly 200,000 people rebuild their lives and livelihoods, paying particular attention to embedding ideas and building methods that will provide more protection if there is another cyclone in the future.

More Emergency appeals

Long-term investment

Nearly half of our spending funded long-term development. We support a huge range of local organisations – from the Movement of the Landless in Brazil, fighting for justice for people who are denied land that is rightfully theirs, to our partner the Centre Ecologique Albert Schweitzer in Burkina Faso which is using new solar technologies to create clean energy.

We support women’s councils in Afghanistan, human rights monitoring in the Gaza Strip and sustainable agriculture in Bangladesh.

But we know that change is about more than on-the-ground development. Change needs to happen at the top. That’s why we, alongside our partners, put pressure on governments and international institutions to make policies work for poor communities.

More Our partners' work

Campaigning

There’s no clearer example of the need to campaign than with the issue of climate change.

Innovation on the ground to protect people from the worst effects of global warming has to be matched by cuts in the carbon emissions that are responsible for causing the problem in the first place – lobbying governments can help make this happen.

Sixteen per cent of our expenditure this year went on education, advocacy and campaigning.

More Act Now

Fundraising

We spent £18 million/€19.4 million on fundraising in 2008/09, realising £5 for every pound invested. The costs of the general running of the organisation, which we call governance, came to £0.9 million/€1 million.

This includes what we spend on our internal auditors, measuring our organisational impact, the costs of the board and director and other staff responsible for strategic management. It doesn’t include administration or fundraising and communications costs.