2021 CEO review — Street Child

Dear All,

I hope you are well and have had as good a 2021 as possible, despite what have remained challenging, and in some cases awful, circumstances for all. 

I’m writing, as has become an end-of-year tradition, to thank you immensely for your support, without which nothing is possible and to share with you a little of what we have been able to achieve as a result. 

There have been immense headwinds! Of course COVID-19 – whoever thought we would be at approximately 100k daily cases in UK this Christmas or that most children in Uganda would still not have been inside a classroom since March 2020? The British Government’s shameful, self-defeating aid-cuts hit our work in South Sudan, Nepal, Afghanistan and especially the Democratic Republic of Congo – on top of a list of advanced pipeline proposals that were snuffed out. And of course, the Taliban re-capturing of power in Afghanistan, where Street Child have been steadily growing our presence since 2018 was shocking, depressing and for many, terrifying.

That all said, Street Child’s strengths include an immense resilience and an ability to get things done, for children who really need us, whatever the weather! Nowhere is this truer than our teams’ immense work in Afghanistan this Autumn, about which more later. But first I want to share some of our other highlights:

In Sierra Leone, our teams worked to transform the educational prospects of 55,000 children – through projects funded by 50% of the proceeds of the brilliant 17/18, 18/19 & 19/20 UK Aid-Matched appeals. I was delighted to be in Sierra Leone for six busy days last month, for the first time in two years. One evening we were sat round a table on another meeting that had gone into the night and I could see, next to me, Daniel, who has lead our family business scheme in Sierra Leone since 2011 scribbling various numbers down furiously. I asked him what he was up to. He replied, “I am adding up how many business grants my team made since you were last in-country … and I think the answer is 10,062!”. There is simply a huge amount of ‘smart-simple’, excellent work going on every day.