Annual Review 2005
Dear Friends,
We are pleased to bring you the 2005 Annual Report for SOS Children’s Villages.
Ongoing work to restore lives after the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004; the G8 summit and renewed commitments for Africa; and the devastating Kashmir earthquake meant that 2005 brought more challenges for SOS Children. It goes without saying, that along with these priorities, we continued to care for the 60,000 children living in our children’s villages and were able also to support almost a million in the community.
Our post-tsunami work was awarded top marks by UN-Habitat during a post-event evaluation of work carried out in the centre of the tsunami region at Banda Aceh, Indonesia, (only a third of agencies studied achieved this). In our review we look at our post-tsunami work and see how lives have been rebuilt.
As a result of your kind donations, we have raised enough money to construct the first SOS Children’s Village funded entirely by UK supporters. The SOS Children’s Village Basse, in The Gambia will create a new home for orphaned, abandoned and destitute children. We are also constructing a new SOS Primary School in Basse which will help educate 420 children aged 6-12 in an area where schooling is almost non-existent.
Following the Kashmir earthquake on 8 October 2005, SOS Children has provided support to thousands of affected people and will continue to do so for the long-term through our unique children’s villages. Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan, commented in an interview that “SOS Children’s Villages is the best custodian of our Kashmiri children”. SOS Children has had villages in Pakistan for thirty years and supported families since the earthquake by providing essential supplies and shelter.
From a fundraising perspective, our decision to shift emphasis to the internet has been very successful, with more than a thousand new sponsors and many donations coming in during 2005 and into 2006. The cost of finding new donors via the internet is less than 1p per pound received and we continue to grow very inexpensively. As a result we achieved the unusual feat of doubling our income in 2005 from 2004! We would particularly like to thank those other supporters who have helped this by linking to our website and generating traffic to www.soschildren.org
With best wishes
Andrew Cates
Chief Executive
SOS Children UK