BB Energy Foundation’s First Three Year Strategy

Over the past year, the Foundation’s Board has carefully developed our first 3 year strategy and I am excited to share with you the key cornerstones of our intentions.

As someone who has worked for over 30 years in the international development sector, working with organisations all over the world to address extreme poverty and inequality, it was a privilege to develop a strategy that aims to address some of the challenges I have observed, not just in terms of our thematic priorities, but above all HOW we support. The process of distributing resources is something that I have experienced first-hand through multiple different relationships with funders, so it was particularly important for me, to ensure that the Foundation is a collaborative and flexible funder with a simple and clear approach.

Firstly, we will focus on women and children, because we know they are disproportionately affected and it is our moral imperative to address the persisting inequalities that women and girls face all over the world. As a long-term advocate for women and girls’ rights, it is a joy to be able to so clearly and unapologetically focus on the population most affected by poverty.

Secondly, we will focus on education, health, and wellbeing. I know from my experience of investing in educational programmes, that is education in all its form – and this includes skills trainings for adult women – that it is deeply and sustainably transformative.

I remember meeting a young girl in Ethiopia 15 years ago, she had experienced genital mutilation and early marriage and had severe health challenges. When I asked her what her greatest wish was, she told me she wanted to learn English. I have never forgotten her. Her story is just one example that no matter what we might have experienced, the desire to learn and grow is deeply and inherently human. And that is why investing in education is fulfilling a fundamental human right and a key cornerstone to addressing poverty.

We will also focus on health and well-being. I am really proud that as a Foundation, we are highlighting health and well-being separately, because so often it is easier to focus on health care and the more visible aspects of health, forgetting about the devastating impact of mental health challenges, trauma and violence.

For us at the Foundation, we understand that education and health and wellbeing go hand in hand. Without wellbeing and health, we are not in a position to learn something new and rebuild our lives. And without education, it is challenging to keep ourselves and our families healthy and well.

Overall, it is our vision – long term – to fund projects around the world in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. For the first year we will focus on Guyana, Rwanda, and South Sudan.

In all of the countries where we will operate, we intend to partner with organisations that are predominantly (at least 70 percent) led and run by women. This really matters, because to say we want to invest in women and children and then to not pay attention to who is running the organisations we collaborate with, didn’t make any sense to the board. We all feel passionately about the power of role models and that is why we are delighted that we have a clear strategy of funding a majority of women-led organisations, with their own independent boards.

We also intend to partner with organisations of different sizes and we are excited to fund innovative projects and pilot work where appropriate.

We will not accept unsolicited grant applications, because we want to keep the administration of the Foundation as lean as possible. We will use our networks and connections to solicit recommendations and we will approach organisations directly.

Our funding approach is focused on investing unrestricted funding wherever this is appropriate. We are passionate about supporting organisations and their mission and not adding to the administrative burden of organisations. Our funding applications and due diligence takes this into account by being as un-bureaucratic as possible in light of our own reporting requirements as an independent foundation.

We are excited to develop deep and long-terms partnerships with organisations and are deeply committed to multi-year grants.

All of our work is informed by our values and as such we will be regularly reviewing the effectiveness and impact of our strategy.

For more information about the BB Energy Foundation you can visit our brand-new website www.bbenergyfoundation.com