At the end of April 2021, many charities across the UK, including many of our own members, received confirmation their UK Aid funding was to be slashed or delayed. This will result in massively damaging impacts to programmes across the world.
The wide-ranging cuts include u-turns on funding agreements with organisations in receipt of grants from the Small Charities Challenge Fund, amongst others.
We also know that other vital projects due to start this last month are being postponed by up to a year. Dr Cathy Ratcliff, CEO and Director of Programmes at EMMS International said: “When other projects are being cut-back or cancelled entirely, we appreciate that UK Aid funding for EMMS International’s work in Nepal is only being postponed.
“However, this is not without consequences. Families battling chronic illness, including the impact of COVID, will wait longer for the care they deserve and so urgently need, and girls in hard-to-reach areas will continue to miss out on their education. For some, the hope of returning to school at all will be lost all together, along with their best opportunity to escape a cycle of sickness and poverty.”
The devasting news to charities and the people and communities they support across the world came only a week after Bond coordinated a letter signed by over 200 UK NGOs working in the development sector, that described the announcement of roughly £5 billion in cuts to ODA (Overseas Development Assistance) as a “tragic blow for many of the world’s most marginalised people the UK once supported.”
Here at the Alliance, we stand in solidarity with those who are losing funding and vehemently oppose the UK Government’s direction of travel at a time when global sustainable development could not be more important.
More information needed to paint the full picture of how the cuts will impact vital work across the world
Our colleagues at Bond and SIDCN are collecting important information to get the full picture of the cuts on iNGOs, large and small.
We encourage members who are impacted by the cuts to feed details to both organisations, if applicable:
- Bond are asking all its members for information where the cuts are happening, and at what scale, in order to inform their policy asks and media response, and to give them the best quality information to push back on decisions as best they can. We encourage all our members to fill in their survey if your funding is being impacted by the cuts.
- Small International Development Charities Network (SIDCN) are also collecting information. Their survey is open to small UK-registered charities, working overseas (below £1 million annual income), affected by UK Aid cuts. They arte specifically gathering details of organisations that have applied to Small Charities Challenge Fund (SCCF) round 6, 7 or 8, or to Community Partnership grants.