International
Comic Relief was born out of the tragedy and devastation of the mid-eighties famine in the Horn of Africa - and in 1986 we made our first grants to work in Africa. Pretty soon we recognised the need to invest in long term development work – to help make people less vulnerable to droughts or other crises in the future. You can see below how much we’ve grown since 1985 - in that first year of grant making we gave £343,908 to projects in Africa whilst during 2007 our Trustees approved alomost £34million.
Not only have we grown but the work that we’ve funded continues to have a big impact - in 1994 we gave a grant of £36k to Kuapa Kokoo, a small farmer’s co-operative in Ghana producing cocoa. From those small beginnings, with the fair trade movement in its infancy, Kuapa Kokoo has grown into the force behind fairly traded chocolate brands such as Dubble and Divine meaning whole communities in Ghana are now able to stand on their own two feet.
Another example of how our funding has created extraordinary change occurred in Rwanda - during 1996 we became one of the first to support a group of survivors of the genocide. With our initial help of £42k a group of women , who had survived unimaginable horrors themselves, were able to provide crucial support and counselling to others, fight for the needs and rights of fellow widows and help members generate an income. This group has transformed and we recently gave them a grant of £1m to provide housing to thousands of widows and other survivor groups of the genocide.
Click on the links below to see where we've spent money internationally since 1986 and you can read more detail about our current grants on the Cash in action page.
