Grants to Charities
The Trust makes a wide variety of grants to various UK charities. Please see our latest set of annual accounts for details. In addition, we refer here to some recent case studies.
Here are some examples of charitable grants made by the Trustees:
Street Child
The Trustees awarded £50,000 to Street Child in November 2025 towards their project supporting education, peace and development in Walungu, in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The grant intends to help conflict affected children, their families and communities. Specifically, the Wote Shuleni programme will provide children with access to quality education by improving education access, economic resilience, child protection and environmental sustainability.
Education access will be enhanced by enrolling out-of-school children through back-to-school campaigns, offering catch-up classes, training teachers in inclusive pedagogies and renovating schools to create safe learning environments.
Economic resilience will be strengthened through Village Savings and Loan Associations which enable families to afford education costs whilst also addressing household needs like food and healthcare.
Child protection services will be offered by psychosocially trained teachers and Child-Friendly Spaces for play, providing children with peacefulness, stability and alternatives to recruitment by armed groups.
Environmental sustainability will be promoted through greening initiatives, including tree planting to improve school environments and foster environmental stewardship.
Minority Rights Group
The Trustees awarded £10,000 to Minority Rights Group in September 2025 towards their project in the Middle East and North Africa to help address the worsening restrictions on civil society, whereby marginalized groups and minorities carry the burden of exclusion from both within civil society and in wider decision-making arenas. This situation leads to ineffective governance, human rights violations and structural discrimination that maintains inequal societies.
The project addresses this by strengthening the functioning of an inclusive civil society which protects and promotes the rights of minorities and other marginalized communities in Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia, and thereby strengthens engagement in policy processes.
The project intends to work through local civil society organisations to provide education to marginalised target groups so that they are more aware of their rights and methods by which they can claim and assert these rights.
The project will: initiate education campaigns, roll out intensive training and capacity-building and see that decision makers receive training and engagement on the rights protection of marginalised groups.
SOS Children’s Villages UK
The Trust awarded a grant of £30,000 to SOS Children’s Villages in 2024 in support of their youth training and employability programme in The Gambia. The project has helped support 150 ambitious young people to gain vocational skills and entrepreneurship training to transform their lives. Click here to learn more about their work and review their impact report.
TESSA – The Open University
For a number of years the Trust has supported the Open University and in 2012 we awarded the OU £1million to help fund their Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa project. Please see their recent report. To find out more about this please click here or visit the TESSA website for further information.
Educational Grants
The Trust makes awards directly to UK Universities (no longer to individual students) to assist overseas graduates with the part funding of their tuition fees for masters courses. All applications for funding by individuals for educational grants are to be made through your University, there is no funding awarded to individuals directly from the Trust.
Here are some examples of educational grants made by the Trustees:
Oxford University
The Trust has supported scholars studying at The Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University with an award of £103,908. The award was used as match funding to fully fund 5 scholarships for African and Asian Commonwealth students allowing them to study a master’s in international human rights Law over two years. To learn more about the 2024 cohort please click here.
Royal Northern College of Music
The Trust has supported up and coming, talented musicians with The Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust scholarship for a number of years. Most recently, the Trust awarded £60,000 over a three year period from September 2022. To read more about the recipients of the 2024/25 scholarships please click here.
King’s College London
The African Women in Leadership and Peacebuilding programme is building a new community of leaders with a commitment to peace and security in Africa. The Trustees awarded £150,000 towards scholarships payable over a three year period from September 2022. To read the latest updates on the 2023-24 fellows please click here.