On 22th December 2022, Street Child was delighted to publish our annual report and accounts for the year 2021/22. By every measure, 2021/22 was our biggest and busiest year to date. Income of £17.3m comfortably exceeded the previous, pre-COVID, high of £13.7m. Correspondingly, programmatic investment was also at a record high of £15.3m, 38% above its previous peak, and impacting thousands more children.
To read the Annual Report in full, please click here.
Some of our highlights of the year, which can be found on page 6-7 of the report, included:
Despite the trauma of the Taliban recapturing power in August 2021, Street Child, thanks to the enormous dedication of our staff and partners in the face of unimaginable stress and strain, delivered on a massive pre-planned scale up in Afghanistan. By early 2022, over 51,000 children (50% girls) were attending Street Child learning centres every day. Moreover, we scaled protection and other humanitarian programmes to respond to the worsening situation in the country - helping nearly 100,000 Afghans over the course of the year.
2021 saw Street Child publish its strategy for the 2021-24 period, the clearest, most ambitious articulation of the charity’s essence to date. We committed ourselves to working for a world where every child is a ‘safe, in school, and learning’. We committed to focussing our efforts in the places in the world where that was the furthest from being true, to doing everything with, and through, local partners. Through our programmes, we aim to make a material impact for ‘a million’ children and pledge to impact ‘millions more’ through our advocacy, capacity support and wider initiatives. We re-committed to agile, ambitious, low-cost approaches and made our clearest commitments yet to embracing the potential of digital, evidence, advocacy, mental health, and climate considerations in all aspects of our work.
COVID cast its shadow over the whole year but to different degrees. Of our programme countries, Nepal was brutally hit by the second wave in May 2021 and Uganda’s school closures were the longest in the world. Meanwhile in places like Sierra Leone disruption was more modest with schools open throughout the year but facing steep headwinds from the economic impact of lockdowns and disruption after months of closure in 2021. Everywhere, Street Child teams and partners adapted and improvised brilliantly to keep programmes moving forwards as powerfully as possible, keeping children and communities safe.
In the UK, fundraising activity started building back strongly from late summer 2021. By the autumn, a dozen new permanent team members, at different levels, joined to replenish our ranks, a great new office space was found and opened on Creechurch Lane in the City. We got back to in-person events with a superb Bike Ride and record-breaking November gala at The Tate Modern with Liberty Global, our first ever event in the Netherlands, a House of Lords dinner and the beautiful annual Tower of London Carols (just before Omicron sent us all home again).
In February 2022, Street Child was thrilled to finalise an agreement to deliver our largest ever programme - an audacious $12.8m scheme to help 96,000 out of school children into primary-level education in Sierra Leone, Liberia and North-East Nigeria over the next four years. Education Above All Foundation’s Educate A Child (EAC) programme has partnered with Street Child to fund 50% of the scheme and Street Child will take on the challenge of sourcing funding for the remaining 50%. This programme, the culmination of a conversation which began with ‘Educate A Child’ in Doha before COVID-19 in late 2019 when Street Child received a WISE award for our ‘family business for education’, has high-level buy-in from the Education Ministries of all three countries. At a time when the charity’s portfolio is rapidly expanding globally it powerfully cements the charity’s commitment to the region where we began work back in 2008. At the close of the financial year, in March 2022, the charity was also keenly awaiting final outcomes of a substantial and innovative ‘payment by results’ proposition to the Government of Ghana and new UNICEF-housed Education Outcomes Fund (which, as discussed in the ‘post-balance sheet events’ section of this report, was successful!).
As well as continuing to deliver all our programmes hand-in-hand with local organisations, 2021/22 presented Street Child with three outstanding opportunities to advance the ‘localisation in emergencies’ agenda at a systems-level; the continuation of our partnership with the UNICEF-lead Child Protection Area of Responsibility (CPAoR), a formalisation of our support to Education Cannot Wait (ECW) (the UN’s global fund for education in emergencies) and the award of a fantastic new grant from USAID. ECW formally engaged Street Child, via its Acceleration Facility, to provide high-level advice on strategies to enhance funding flows to local organisations across its flagship multi-year programming. USAID awarded Street Child $3m to proactively work across 35 humanitarian contexts over 24-months to enhance prospects for local organisations to secure funding, working with clusters and inter-agency working groups (as we have with the child protection sector, through our partnership with CPAoR) to develop working practices that maximise opportunities for local organisations and providing hands-on support and training to local income generation efforts.
Within 24-hours of the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Street Child, despite having no prior programme presence in Europe, decided to act- and launched an appeal to our supporters. We knew there would be immense suffering, we knew local organisations could make a massive difference and we knew that, as everywhere, local groups would struggle to raise the funds their unique capabilities deserve. By the end of March, thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we had identified and been able to fund six local charities and were laying the foundations for what clearly, and sadly, looked set to be an enduring and substantial response.