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Annual report 2009-10

Annual Report & Accounts 2009-10

Practical Action's annual report and accounts for 2009-10 are available to download as a PDF file. They include a review of our international programmes against strategic objectives, the report of the independent auditors and a detailed financial statement.

Annual Report & Accounts 2009-10 (PDF, 1.3Mb)

Contents

  • Joint message from the Chair and Chief Executive Officer
  • Report of the Board of Trustees
  • Review of the Year and Strategic Objectives
  • Financial Review
  • Structure, Governance and Management
  • Legal and administrative details
  • Independent Auditors’ Report
  • Financial Statements
  • Consolidated statement of financial activities
  • Consolidated and company balance sheets
  • Consolidated cash flow statement
  • Notes to the financial statements

Joint message from the Chair and CEO

2009/10 has been a challenging year for everyone. The global economic slow down has had devastating effects in every corner of the globe and, as always, it is the poor and most vulnerable who are amongst the worst affected.

Practical Action has not been immune from the effects of the recession, with the loss of value of the pound increasing many of its costs overseas. But the loyalty and generosity of our donors and supporters has been extraordinary and, as a result, income has held up and we have been able to make significant headway against the targets we set ourselves in our five year strategy.

In 2009/10 we helped a further 944,000 people across all of our programmes. This comes on top of the 1,298,000 people who benefitted from our work in the first two years of our strategy and means we are well on our way to hitting our target of three million people directly helped by Practical Action by 2012. On top of this we helped even more people by sharing knowledge through our Practical Answers service. When people download information in the form of technical briefs from our website, or have their specific technical enquiries answered by one of our experts, we ask them to say what they intend to use the information for and how many people they expect to benefit from its use. In 2009/10, these self reported potential beneficiaries totalled more than three million people. Whilst we treat this figure as only indicative, it does give a sense of the scale of our broader impact.

Practical Action’s subsidiary Practical Action Consulting has delivered 84 projects in 43 countries. Practical Action Publishing has also had a good year, and after concluding several productive co-publishing agreements with other development organizations, including Oxfam, saw sales income rise by 30% compared with 2008–09 while costs were contained.

The failure of the international community to reach a climate change deal in Copenhagen was hugely disappointing to Practical Action, given the work we and others had put into highlighting the huge negative impact it is having on the poor in the developing world. We remain committed to both keeping this issue on the international policy agenda and sharing our experience and expertise in relation to adaptation to climate change in developing countries. We also remain committed to demonstrating through our own actions that it is possible to make significant reductions in carbon usage whilst continuing to build our impact. At the end of 2009/10 we confirmed that our organisational carbon footprint was 28% less than 3 years ago, despite overall growth in turnover over the same period.

On a sadder note, we remember a much appreciated colleague. Nick Selbie, Practical Action Trustee, Treasurer and Head of our Finance and Governance Sub Committee passed away unexpectedly during the year. Nick was a very active trustee and his contributions to the organisation will be much missed.

We would like to thank all those who have supported us over the past year and look forward to another exciting year ahead.

Stephen Watson
Chair, Practical Action

Simon Trace
Chief Executive Officer

Download Annual Report & Accounts 2009-10 (PDF, 1.3Mb)

Country and regional annual reports

Annual reports are also available from Practical Action's regional offices:

Previous years

The following editions of our annual reports are still available:

Please note that prior to 2005, Practical Action was known as ITDG (Intermediate Technology Development Group).

To read these reports, you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader.
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