AN INTRODUCTION TO CONCERN WORLDWIDE
C
Our mission is to enable poor people to achieve major, long-term improvements in their lives
oncern Worldwide was founded in Ireland in 1968 in response to a famine in the Nigerian province of Biafra. By 1970 we were responding to the cyclone disaster in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the organisation that started as Africa Concern became simply Concern, with a remit that was becoming global. Over the years, we have expanded our operations to work in 30 of the world’s poorest countries – countries like Ethiopia, Somalia, Niger, Cambodia, Sudan and Afghanistan. We work as a non-governmental, international, humanitarian organisation and our mission is to enable poor people to achieve major, long-term improvements in their lives that are sustainable without ongoing external support. With offices in Dublin, London, Belfast and Glasgow, and an affiliate organisation in New York, Concern has an annual income of approximately £80 million. We believe in keeping our administrative costs to a bare minimum - our management approach ensures that eighty four
pence in every pound goes straight to helping poor people and communities. This allows us to spend the vast majority of the funds we raise on our overseas programmes.
What Concern does
Concern works as both a fast response emergency agency, and a facilitator of long-term development projects. We recognise that there is a strong link between poverty and the impact of emergencies and maintain a clear mission to respond to emergencies alongside our established development work. Both our emergency and development modes were in evidence in our response to the earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005. Concern has been working in Pakistan since 2001, when we started an emergency response programme to help people affected by the Afghan refugee crisis. Our presence on the ground at the time of the earthquake meant that we could make use of our well established network of local partner organisations to respond rapidly to the disaster. Immediate relief items such as winterised tents, blankets, food packets and stoves were distributed to 20,000 families in North West Frontier Province and Kashmir. Our priorities were to provide people with temporary shelter to enable them to survive the harsh winter, and to ensure they had access to clean water and sanitation services.
We believe in working directly with local people & in partnership with local bodies
Our response to this crisis was immediate and utterly practical. We have strategically placed warehouses that enable us to rapidly transport food, medical supplies and shelter materials to where they are needed. And our colourfully-named Rapid Deployment Unit transfers trained staff to help on frontline projects for weeks and months within days of a crisis occurring - two staff from the London office recently spent two months helping to set up our emergency response to the food crisis in Niger.
Working in partnership Concern works with governments, both central and local, to ensure that programmes fit into national plans where possible. We believe in working directly with local people, and in partnership with local bodies and other international agencies, to develop the capacities of people as we provide relief and assistance. We strongly believe that employing local professionals – nurses, civil engineers, agriculturalists, teachers and administrative staff – as well as a small number of essential international staff, is key to ensuring the long-term sustainability of our programmes. To this end, we work through existing structures, such as health and education services, and supplement them where they are weak or do not exist. We fight our ideological corner too, and take very seriously the role of charities like ourselves in persuading world leaders to do better in the fight against poverty. We campaign on development issues, and use our expertise to exert influence where possible. Our Chief Executive was a member of the UN Task Force on Hunger, and has recently been appointed to the UN’s top-level committee on humanitarian aid, the Central Emergency Response Fund. We work with other organisations in both our programme and advocacy work, and belong to a number of networks including Alliance
www.concern.net
London Office Concern Worldwide Unit 13 & 14 Calico House Clove Hitch Quay London SW11 3TN Tel: 0207 738 1033 Email:
[email protected]
2015, the UK Consortium on AIDS and International Development and the Disasters Emergency Committee.
The beginning of 2006 saw an exciting new collaboration between Concern and Positive Lives, a unique project that photographs and documents the impact of the global HIV&AIDS epidemic through moving personal stories. Concern commissioned new photographic work in Rwanda, where we are working with the Ministry of Health to deliver a Voluntary Counselling and Testing programme. In January the Positive Lives exhibition, including the new work from Rwanda, was shown in Northern Ireland for the first time thanks to a partnership between Concern and the University of Ulster. We also sponsored a book to accompany the exhibition, Positive Lives: International responses to HIV&AIDS.
Looking ahead Concern’s Irish roots are still evident with our international headquarters based in Dublin. However, since 1980, when we opened our first UK office, more and more people in the UK have become familiar with our work each year. We now have over 100,000 generous supporters, including 25,000 people who make regular gifts towards our work overseas. We have grown fast, but for the best of reasons – by reporting our work and our mission with vigour and honesty. As we look to the future we will continue to work at the sharp end of things and we will continue to innovate in our relief and development programmes. For example, our Disaster Risk Reduction approach helps the poorest and most vulnerable to plan for potential disasters and minimise their impact. Simple interventions, such as supplying families with drought resistant seeds, or planting trees in areas prone to flooding or landslides can prove life-saving should disasters occur. And we will continue to expand our work with people affected by HIV&AIDS. Over the next five years we will scale up our HIV&AIDS programmes to reach 500,000 people directly, and four million people will indirectly benefit. Ultimately, through these and all our other programmes, we will continue to work on the frontline to provide a practical human response to human need wherever it occurs.
Belfast Office Concern Worldwide 47 Frederick Street Belfast BT1 2LW Tel: 02890 331100 Email:
[email protected]
Glasgow Office Concern Worldwide 40 St Enoch Square Glasgow G1 4DH Tel: 0141 221 3610 Email:
[email protected]
Registered Charity No.1092236 Photos: CONCERN WORLDWIDE
Once immediate needs had been dealt with, we began to address people’s long-term needs. We are now working with communities in North West Frontier Province to improve people’s longterm, sustainable access to food and income. We are providing farmers with seeds, tools and fertilizers to enable them to restart farming activities, providing small business owners with vocational training, and repairing roads, irrigation channels and water facilities.
