ActionAid spent £326,000 on redundancy and termination costs – equivalent to 4% of its wage bill – during 2024, as it reduced its staff headcount by 8%, the charity’s latest accounts show.
The cuts came as the charity, which works with women and girls living in poverty, saw changes to its senior leadership and its overall income drop by 14%, from £53.3m in 2023 to £46.1m.
Its fall in income was largely driven by a £4.4m reduction in money from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), with the charity also reporting that the cost-of-living crisis and other factors led to a £1.7m decline in donations.
However, ActionAid posted its second-highest annual income from legacies – a total of £3.46m, up around £150,000 from the year before.
Donations and legacies, including money from DEC, continued to make up the bulk of the charity’s income – 74% in 2024, down from 78% in 2023.
An ActionAid spokesperson told Civil Society: “In 2024, ActionAid UK undertook a financial sustainability project to secure the organisation's long-term future in response to significant external challenges, including a long-standing deficit.
“Like many in the sector, we faced difficult but necessary financial decisions to reduce costs, including a reduction in headcount.
“These measures were vital to return the organisation to financial stability, uphold good governance, align our resources more closely with our strategic priorities, and ensure we can continue delivering impact with the communities we work with.
“These changes, while difficult, have strengthened our ability to prioritise funding for partners, and deepen our commitment to impactful collaboration.”
Staff turnover at all levels
Last year, ActionAid saw its former chief executive Halima Begum leave in March after less than 12 months in post to join Oxfam GB.
After she left, three co-CEOs, Hannah Bond, Taahra Ghazi, and Folasade Odupelu, jointly assumed the CEO role on an interim basis while continuing in their substantive director positions.
This saw the total aggregated remuneration during 2024 for Begum and those holding the co-CEO role reach £350,000, which also covered their director responsibilities.
Across the charity, the number of staff earning more than £60,000 a year increased to 14 in 2024, compared with 11 in 2023.
Besides the three co-CEOs, who each earned between £100,000 and £110,000, eight employees were paid between £60,000 and £70,000, compared with five the year before.
Overall through, average headcount reduced from 209 to 193, with fundraising posts shrinking by almost a fifth from 79 to 66. There were 73 employees engaged in charitable activities, compared with 77 in 2023, and 54 support staff (53 in 2023).
Despite the fall in workers, ActionAid’s wage and salaries bill of £8.9m was identical to the previous year’s.
‘Exceptionally busy year’
ActionAid’s annual report noted that the charity had been “exceptionally busy” in a world marked by conflict and emergency in 2024, with operations taking place in locations hit by humanitarian disasters including Gaza and the West Bank.
But it said the charity’s 14% income drop had been driven by there being “no emergencies on the scale of the 2022 Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal, or the 2023 Turkiye/Syria Earthquake appeal”.
The report added: “Our public fundraising income was affected by giving trends amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis and the decline of high-giving towards the Ukraine response; these trends saw the proportion of donations going to overseas aid and disaster relief halved from 2022.”
Expenditure decreased in 2024 to £48.7m, from £54.7m, which ActionAid said was “mainly due to a decrease in grants remitted, and a cost reduction exercise in quarter 1 of 2024”.
The charity’s general reserves of £7.7m remained almost at the level of the year before (£7.8m), representing 4.4 months of planned annual expenditure – well above a minimum of 2.6 months set in its policies.
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