[From our 2009-2010 Annual Report]

Children’s rights

As a child-focused organisation, ensuring the protection of children’s rights is of utmost importance to our work, both in the UK and in Zambia. All our staff, trustees and visitors to Zambia follow our child protection policy (20 page pdf document)

Vulnerability of girls

We are working with our partners to better understand the particular needs of girls and young women in our programmes and to identify ways in which we can respond to those needs. We have continued to build on our work of identifying the reasons for higher drop-out levels for girls than boys and working with families to help them find ways of continuing their education.

Trustees and partners have begun exploring ways that we can further improve the support that we give to girls and young women, who are even more vulnerable to poverty, illness and exploitation than their male counterparts.

Governance and Accountability

For the second consecutive year, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the Charities Aid Foundation awarded Cecily’s Fund first prize in our category in their Charities On-Line Financial Report and Accounts Awards.

We hold ourselves accountable to the children we support, our partner organisations, and all those who contribute to our work.

Our partners provide monthly narrative and financial reports throughout the year as well as annual audited accounts. This year, our staff and trustees undertook three visits to Zambia to monitor and help develop our programmes.

We make time for face-to-face discussions with our partners and the young people whom we support, to reflect on the issues we are facing together, and then work to resolve them together.

By definition, partnership is a two-way process. We seek to foster a genuine sense of partnership, for example by inviting feedback from our partners on our performance as donors and acting upon it.

We send all our supporters and partners this Annual Report and post it on our website (www.cecilysfund.org/ar.html), along with a ‘Statutory Annual Report’ which complies with the full requirements of the Charity Commission’s latest Statement of Recommended Practice. Our accounts are subject to full audit.

Capacity Building

We are committed to working with our partners to strengthen their capacity in areas such as planning, management, fundraising, accounting, and programme development. We do this both directly and by putting our partners in touch with other organisations and people who can help, like Accountants for International Development which placed an accountant, David Black, pro bono with CHEP for six weeks. We are continuously developing our skills at Cecily’s Fund, just as our partners are developing theirs, and we learn from them as much as they do from us.

We encourage our partners to talk openly with us and their other key donors because we have a shared interest in the effective management and sustainability of their organisations. This is essential in order to ensure ongoing support for our children.

Monitoring and Evaluation

We involve teachers, community members, and the children and young people we support in the ongoing monitoring of the effectiveness of our work. This not only helps us to check that what we are doing is effective, but also helps identify reasons for successes and failure from which we can learn.

In March 2010, we initiated and participated in a three-day workshop with key representatives of all three partners to increase our understanding and practice of monitoring and evaluating our work together. This was the first stage in an on-going process of developing rigorous procedures to measure the results of our work. This will help us to learn better from our experience, improve our services for the children and report more accurately to our donors.

We will continue to measure the changes in children’s lives that we are contributing to as they progress through and complete school.

Advocacy

Our advocacy work is an integral part of our fundraising, communication and programme activities. In the UK, Switzerland and the USA we strive to increase awareness about the impact of HIV on Zambian children by providing accurate and up-to-date information on our website and giving talks in schools, universities and to community groups. Within Zambia, with our partners, we highlight the needs of vulnerable Zambian children identified in the course of our work, and lobby government agencies and the private sector to meet them.

In September 2009, Sue Skaf (an AFCF Director), met with President Rupiah Banda in New York. She told him about our work in Zambia, which he said he greatly appreciated. We hope to stay in touch with the President's office in Zambia to help ensure that orphans have the best possible opportunities at school and beyond.

Our Chairman, William Powlett Smith, and founder, Basil Eastwood, regularly attend meetings of the Africa Forum, a group ofsmall charities which have informally joined forces to share lessons and lobby on issues that affect the people they support.