Development Ratings

SolarAid has hired a fundraising director to develop high net worth fundraising. This will release the CEO to concentrate on managing the organisation’s growth, project development and major grant proposals. The charity plans to make use of celebrity endorsements through the contacts of its Chairman. A great deal of work has been done to date to develop the charity’s corporate relations. It has already secured the backing of major corporations, trusts and funds. Vodafone is donating 60% of the funds it receives from its recycling and reuse of mobile phones campaign in the UK over the next two years. This may amount to £1-2m, depending on the success of the campaign. The transfers to date have been above expectations. A proportion of these resources are earmarked to fund core costs, with £400,000 already committed for this until mid-2009. This allows the flexibility for project development rather than having growth constrained by core funding and expansion issues.

Partly to help with raising grant funds, SolarAid is setting up monitoring and evaluation procedures. These will also help with replicating the development of larger projects and new country rollouts. Baseline socio-economic data will be measured, followed by milestone surveys and interviews to monitor impact. Indicators will relate to delivery, budgets, quality, income changes, community involvement, etc. There will be a control group for comparison. Data will be collected electronically by volunteers and analysed independently. Early work on this is being hampered by the informal nature of local accounting so training is being carried out.

Gold Standard accreditation applications (to sell carbon off-sets for kerosene lamp conversion) for Zambia and Malawi have been completed. The final review stage is underway. This will help ensure a level of income sustainability. Project development in Tanzania will be partly based around church dioceses as an existing infrastructure of buyers and sellers of the products. The charity will research other partners in the existing and planned countries for future projects and is rapidly developing NGO contacts. SolarAid’s wish list includes funding for hiring support staff in 2009, and to replace the current core funding from financial year 2010.