Lewis Macdonald MSP, Convenor of the Scottish Parliament Cross Party Group on International Development, welcomed Bill Gates during his recent visit to Edinburgh, to a meeting in the Parliament.  Attendees included our member organisations EMMS International, Glasgow University Centre for International Development, SCIAF and Signpost International.

Struggling to get your head around GDPR? In need of some new fundraising ideas? Or maybe you want some inspiration to improve your comms? Join us for our new annual training day!

In response to demand from our members, this year we will look at three key topics throughout the day: GDPR, fundraising and communication. Places are limited, so don’t delay! 

You saw the recent headlines, ‘8 million tonnes of plastic waste dumped in our oceans every year’, and ‘Plastics take hundreds of years to degrade’. 

Waste, including plastics, is a problem all around the world; in fact 2 billion people don’t have any waste collection. Jill Matthews, of WasteAid UK explains why her organisation encourages people around the world to see waste as a resource, not rubbish to be dumped and washed into the sea.

Dr. Alasdair Allan, Scottish Government Minister for International Development, is joining us for a third meeting in this new series of quarterly meetings with representatives of the international development sector in Scotland.  The meeting will be on 28 February, 0930-1200, in Central Edinburgh. 

The format is informal dialogue, roundtable style, with agenda items put forward by participants.  Numbers are therefore strictly limited to twenty. Click below to find out more.

On 26 January 2018, Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP, Secretary of State for International Development met with a range of Alliance members in the University of Edinburgh’s Easter Bush campus. She invited members to speak about their own organisations’ priorities and their views on what the priorities for DFID ought to be, and gave an overview of  the different issues to which she is especially committed.  Jane Salmonson, CEO of the Alliance, spoke of the distinctive contribution being made by Scottish civil society.

 How do we know we are really making the impact we want to achieve? Are we asking the right questions?  Come along to our next MEL (Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning) Working Group event on 27 February to find out more about Impact Assessment.

Chris Martin, Impact and Learning Advisor at Mary’s Meals, will be the guest speaker.

The dreaded F word... finance. It is the topic that many charities prefer not to think about.

Our new 3-part online training series on charity finance is just the thing to help get your books in order!

The first session will be pre-recorded and will be on our website from Thursday 8th February.  You can watch this session at any point after that, in your own time, as long as you do so before the first live session on 1st March.