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Jersey Overseas Aid increased its aid for victims of the war on Syria with three grants totalling over £1.5m in 2016, leading the charity chairman to say Jersey is "punching above its weight in the humanitarian sphere."
The charity allocated a total of £7.3 million grants, including to projects covering clean water, health, sanitation, education, income generation, agriculture, gender equality and environmental schemes.
The grants followed a "major change" in the way the charity operates. The number of countries it focuses on was narrowed to enable Jersey "to achieve greater impact in each place, encourage projects to build on each other’s successes, and allow us to build up more knowledge about local priorities and more expertise about what works where," Chairman Deputy Carolyn Labey wrote in her foreword to the 2016 Annual Report, which was published this year.
16 countries were selected, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia, as well as Bhutan, Nepal and Myanmar, Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala.
Deputy Labey said they were chosen "on the basis of needs - as represented by Human Development Index Scores - and the likely ability of our money to effect lasting change (using Transparency International’s ‘Corruption Perceptions’ score as a proxy). As far as I know, this makes us the only donor in the world to formally take corruption into account when targeting our aid."
Pictured: Deputy Carolyn Labey is Chairman of JOA.
Through this change, the organisation hopes to fund bigger, longer-term and higher-impact interventions. Deputy Labey wrote: "Multi-year projects are almost always more effective, cost-efficient and sustainable than single-year ones (it’s hard to achieve lasting change in just 12 months, as we ourselves know!). However, with greater sums of taxpayers’ money at stake for each project, we have to ensure that our ability to oversee them is as robust as possible.
"Our internal reforms have given us the confidence to launch 12 new multi-year development projects this year, and to tee up some even larger ones (including a much-scaled-up Dairy improvement project in Rwanda with the RJA&HS and Jersey’s best Ambassadors: our beloved Jersey cows) to begin in early 2017. Through them, we are beginning to have an appreciable impact on the health, livelihoods and education not only of individuals and villages, but of regions and even entire countries."
£2.4 million was allocated to emergency relief projects and exceptional grants to the charity's standard policy were made in response to those displaced following the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria and Lebanon. Community Work Projects were organised in Uganda and Zambia, involving 22 volunteers at a net cost inclusive of materials and equipment of £185,000.
Pictured: Some of the projects involved supplying clean water to communities in need.
12 grants totalling £265,000 were awarded to local organisations for aid projects overseas. Some charities, with an established record of project implementation with the Commission, were awarded grants covering the total funding required, whilst others were awarded grants on the basis of matching on monies fundraised by the submitting organisation itself.
With more reforms introduced by the end of 2016, including a stricter application processes for local and international charities and new criteria for scoring and choosing projects, the charity is stepping up its efforts to "bring life-changing assistance to at least as many people as live on our little North-Atlantic rock."
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