UK Social Enterprise Accounting for International Development have been sending accounting and finance professionals, including many ICAEW members, on volunteer assignments across the globe for more than 10 years. But what happens when overseas travel becomes impossible, practically overnight?
AfID’s volunteer manager Dave Busby explains: “When the true extent of the pandemic first hit, our immediate priority was of course to get our overseas volunteers home safely.
“And then the reality of the situation really hit home. Our overseas charity partners were still very much in need of crucial financial management support, often for their very survival, but there was little prospect of being able to send volunteers to work with local finance teams for the foreseeable future.
Last modified on Thu 6 May 2021 10.16 EDT
The UK has scrapped three rounds of grants to small international development charities, prompting fury that it has wiped out funding for 42 projects around the world to save âless than the [£2.6m] cost of the Downing Street press roomâ.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told charities last week that rounds six, seven and eight of the Small Charities Challenge Fund (SCCF) would not go ahead because of aid cuts, cancelling in total about £2.1m of funds earmarked for new and future programmes, including many that had been approved.
âThe cruelty of these cuts cannot be overstated. For less than the cost of the Downing Street press room, small UK charities would have delivered more than 40 transformative projects to the worldâs most vulnerable people,â said Jess Price, a director at Health Improvement Project Zanzibar. âInstead of delivering this critical work, we are now trying to reco