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Where we worked
In 2021, we worked in 55 countries and ran projects in 51 of them across Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and Europe. In those 51 countries, we ran 686 projects.
Together, we helped 24.5 million people.
59% of our programmes – supporting 14.4 million people – focused on health and nutrition. 28.6% of them – reaching 5.7 million people – focused on WASH. We reached 3.3 million people with our food security and livelihoods work, over 368,000 with mental health care, and over 600,000 people to reduce the risks of disasters before they hit.
Emergencies
We responded to 55 emergencies in 21 countries. While the number of emergencies has remained the same as previous years, emergencies were experienced in fewer countries – meaning some countries were hit multiple times.
In terms of geographical spread, the vast majority of emergency responses were in Africa, with 40 of the 55 emergency responses in the continent.
Security incidents
As we all know, hunger crises are in most cases driven by violence. That’s why we’re working in some of the most volatile countries in the world.
In 2021, we’ve seen an increase in security incidents compared to 2020. While 80% were minor incidents, we experienced 24 severe or critical incidents, from car accidents to shelling and assaults on our staff.
We take the safety and security of our staff and the people we work with very seriously. so to better protect them from further harm, we’ve doubled the number of staff trained in between 2020 and 2021, to over 1,600.
Research
We’re renowned for our expertise that requires constant innovation and research. In 2021, we carried out 55 research projects that were covered in more than 100 research publications.
The vast majority – 88% – included our nutrition expertise. Nearly half included health and a third included mental health support.
Income and expenditure
Across the global network, our annual income continues to rise – reaching £442 million in 2021. That’s over £12 million more than the previous year and £59 million more than the year before that.
Of that total, £330 million were restricted public funds – a slight decrease of £8 million from 2020.
We experienced a decrease in grants from the UN and the governments of the US, UK, Spain and Switzerland. But we saw an increase in grants from the EU and the governments of Germany, France, Canada and Sweden. Meanwhile, our unrestricted and restricted income from private sources continues to rise year on year, with an impressive 25% increase compared to 2020. This is good news as it enables us to be quicker in our humanitarian response, to fund programmes in forgotten crises and to invest in innovations.
According to our figures, we have seen a sharp increase in the number of people donating to us, either with a one-off donation or a recurring, or regular gift. Almost 800,000 people donated to us, a quarter of a million more than 2020.
In terms of how we spent our funds in 2021, 91% was spent on programmes, 7% on fundraising and 2% on management, governance and support services.