Project spending
The total expenditure of our charity arm, Traidcraft Exchange, rose by some 30% to £1,905,000, reflecting an increased scale of project activity. Institutional funding already raised means that this figure is set to continue rising strongly over the next few years.
Strategic focus
We have decided to focus the work of our charity around three programmes to support tea, cotton and craft producers.
We will also continue to build on our more generic themes of developing the availability of business services to poor producer groups, supporting the development of fair trade and lobbying for changes to international trade policies and practices that adversely affect the poor.
We believe this greater focus of our resources will enable us to increase our effectiveness and impact, and will help funders to understand our core areas of expertise.
Offices
We have established offices in key regions of the world, adding an office in Cambodia to those already established in Kenya and Bangladesh, and we plan to establish a fourth office in India during 2007-2008 (delayed from 2006-2007).
These offices provide a regional focus for our development work enabling us to engage with and influence key networks in which we are involved. These offices are key to our development work enabling us to engage with our partners and influence key networks in which we are involved.
Supplier support
Approximately £45,000 was spent by Traidcraft plc on funding supplier support activities over and above normal levels of Fairtrade benefits.
In total the spend of the Supplier Support Team was £162,000 including funding visits to suppliers and supplier focussed work with wider fair trade networks.
Traidcraft also carries out considerable work on product design, quality and logistics support – which is considerably over and above what a normal commercial buyer would do. We aim to be able to explain and quantify this support work much more accurately in future years.
Product development
A new Blueberry Geobar product has been launched as part of a new initiative to source blueberries from the Apicoop producer group in Chile, who currently supply fair trade honey for Geobars.
The aim is to create a market in the UK through the sales of these Blueberry Geobars so that, by the time the Apicoop blueberry plants reach maturity, we are able to purchase the harvest and bring the world’s first fair trade blueberries into the market.
