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NEWS

August/September 2012 www.esb.ie/em

ElectricAid celebrates 25 years

ElectricAid celebrates 25 years of assistance to the poorest of the poor in the developing world. The ground-breaking staff charity was founded in 1987, inspired by the Band Aid and Live Aid responses to the Ethiopian famine of 1984. However, from the beginning ElectricAid was more about development aid than disaster relief. Inspired by ESB’s partnership business-model and by the trade-union background of many of its founder members, ElectricAid works for social justice, helping communities develop out of the conditions that lead to hunger, ill-health and educational ignorance being common place. The staff charity has helped people in Africa, Asia, South America and Eastern Europe, as well as those here in Ireland who are less fortunate because of disability or social disadvantage. Here, let us pause to celebrate this remarkable initiative’s silver anniversary. This is a story of real partnership between staff, ESB pensioners, the ESB company and a host of organisations working to make this world a better, fairer place. Yes, we will continue to respond to disasters as they arise, but our main activity, long term, will be supporting grass roots development out of poverty.

I send my sincere congratulations to ElectricAid on 25 years of successful service. Over the years, from small beginnings, ElectricAid has grown to benefit hundreds of thousands of people in real need, in an enduring way, both in Ireland and across the globe. ESB has been with you from the start, and has been delighted and proud to support your work.

ElectricAid represents the very best of our values in ESB. Over the years, committee members, trustees, and thousands of contributors, have reached out and helped those less fortunate.

I look forward to another quarter-century of success on behalf of people in Ireland and all over the Developing World.

Well done!

Pat O’Doherty
Chief Executive

ElectricAid’s Work

Below are some of the partners and types of projects that ElectricAid supports.

Sanitation and Education
Since 2004, ElectricAid has sponsored Aidlink works projects in Kenya, Uganda and Ghana, where the Irish NGO works with local organisations in the areas of water and sanitation, food security, education and health care.

In the last three years alone, ElectricAid’s support of Aidlink has given more than 50,000 people access to cleaner, safer water supplies.

Of particular note is Aidlink’s work to provide sanitary toilet facilities in primary schools, not only reducing the transmission of disease but freeing girls from the chore of fetching water so they can spend more time in the classroom. Student absenteeism and drop-out rates have fallen as a result. An ancillary benefit is that negative cultural practices have also been reduced, including marriage at an early age and female genital mutilation.

Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security
For nearly a decade ElectricAid has supported the poverty-eradication programmes of Self Help Africa (SHA), investing close to €150,000 in more than a dozen development projects in sub-Saharan Africa.

SHA micro-projects, such as crop-irrigation, irrigation and seed-purchasing schemes, in Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Malawi have enabled tens of thousands of Africans to grow more and earn more, allowing them invest in better living conditions, education and healthcare for their families.

Micro-finance for Micro-Enterprise
The idea of micro-finance is to give people access to affordable credit to allow them to use their own enterprise to gain self-sufficiency. ElectricAid has had a relationship with Emesco Development Foundation in Uganda since 2005 and, to date, 15 projects with a funding value of €206,514, have been successfully executed, improving the quality of life of some 220,000 rural poor people.

Health
ElectricAid’s partnership with Partners In Health (PIH) has, since 2005, led to dramatic improvements in the lives of people in Haiti, Malawi, Lesotho, and Rwanda.

In Haiti, one of the world’s poorest countries, PIH projects funded by ElectricAid have improved access to clean water, increased economic opportunities for women, improved the health of newborns and helped treat children for malnutrition.

When Haiti was struck by an earthquake in January 2010, ElectricAid responded within days to provide essential, life-saving services for thousands of people. More recently, PIH was helped by ElectricAid to treat thousands of people critically-ill with cholera.

Disabilities in Ireland
CoAction West Cork provides training and education for people with intellectual disabilities and ElectricAid has helped it buy adaptive technology for its clients and three interactive whiteboards for use in its training centres in Bantry, Castletownbere and Skibbereen.

The whiteboards are used to access online teaching resources, browse the internet and to show films etc. For teachers, lessons and individual student records can be saved quickly and easily, while for students with disabilities and low literacy, the interactive audio-visual learning-experience makes ‘lessons come alive’.

“ElectricAid is a stand-alone entity, owned and controlled by its 2,700 contributing members

The ElectricAid Value Multiplier
Your donation to ElectricIreland goes a long way, partly because the price of labour and materials is so much lower in the developing world than it is in Ireland, partly because of the matching funding we receive from ESB and EirGrid and partly because we handle donations very tax efficiently.

In the developing world, for example, a two-room school can be built for €6,000, a micro-enterprise loan scheme to help hundreds of families become self-sufficient can be established with €10,000 and a fresh-water well serving thousands of people can be drilled for €8,000.

The value-for-money of your contribution is further increased by a multiplier effect that starts with your donation:

• If 10 new members sign up for ‘a fiver a week’ €2,600 annually
• Matching funding from ESB or EirGrid comes to €1,730
• Revenue tax rebates provide €1,800
• We now have an annual resource of €6,130
• Spent in the Developing World that €6,130 is equivalent in purchasing value to at least €50,000 in Ireland. This is extraordinary value. This is the ElectricAid value multiplier.