12 things we’re proud of in 2024

2024 was a year of seismic electoral change, escalating global crises and, as ever, a tough year for international development. 

But, at the same time, we have had an incredibly busy and productive year, working for and with our members to create invaluable resources, put on memorable events and advocate for the communities we and our members work with around the world.

Here are a few things we’re proud of from 2024. 

Our members

We have 365 members, 202 of them small NGOs, representing a healthy breadth of size for the sector. Of our members, 85% had staff engage with our 40 Working Groups, and 1,400 members attended one of our events. Without our members we’re nothing, so we’d like to thank all of them for being wonderful collaborators and steerers over the years. 

You can find out a little bit more about what some of our Working Groups got up to this year here. 

Upping our events game

We put on or helped host a staggering 65 events and working group meetings this year, both in person and as webinars. This was a large increase from the year before, especially when it came to in-person events, with almost twice as many as in 2023. We worked with a huge variety of partners, both corporate and NGOs, covering a dizzying array of subjects. We’re going to keep up the momentum next year. 

Our media and comms work

We published 140 blogs from a massive array of experts, members and colleagues, and issued 61 press releases  covering a range of topics including the autumn budget, Band Aid 40, our reaction to new government appointments and the defunding of UNWRA. We had over 200 media hits, and placed op-eds for MP’s Sarah Champion and Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Bond’s CEO Romilly Greenhill. 

We also published 26 resources on a variety of subjects and different formats, which leads neatly on to. . .

The Bond Manifesto

Knowing we would most likely have an election at some point in 2024, we started working on our manifesto last year. 

Through a series of workshops and engagements, various Bond working group meetings and other consultations, we reached out across our membership to identify the key issues that the sector wanted the next government to champion in pursuit of creating a fairer and more sustainable world. All Bond member organisations were invited to join this process, and over four months, members fed back to create several draft versions of a manifesto, before a final version was produced, which was supported by all the members who participated in the process.  

The result was The Bond Manifesto: a global system for people and planet. Our most robust and researched pre-election manifesto ever.

This is the Work

In late October, Bond, Peace Direct, and the Advocacy Team created a new set of resources and findings focused on advancing anti-racist and decolonial approaches in international policy and advocacy.

The aim is to reshape how policies are developed, implemented and advocated for to inspire transformative change across the sector. It was a long process, but we’re incredibly proud of This is the Work and encourage all policy and advocacy specialists to read it. 

Civil society and civic space

This year saw more people vote in elections than any other year in history, but it also saw backsliding and erosion of civic space across the globe. In July, we published UK civic space: what is happening? 2023-2024, a snapshot at the state of UK civic space over the past year, which identified the key trends and developments of restrictions affecting campaigners and civil society in the UK.

Ahead of the election, we also refreshed all of our guidance on electoral campaigning rules, and hosted a Q&A session for members to make sure everyone knew about compliance. 

Justice led approaches to international development

This year saw our extensive work on the Future Dialogues project come to an end. We went out with a stellar piece of work, Justice-led approaches to global development, which brought together two discussion papers: a provocation on justice-based ideas for the development sector and a summary of the roundtable discussion. These papers capture key insights and explore innovations and possibilities for embracing justice-led approaches to create a more equitable and just future. The papers encourage NGOs and the wider sector to commit to solidarity and address long standing inequalities and embedded power imbalances by prioritising building long-term relationships, shifting resources and decision-making to marginalised communities.

UK aid and sustainable economic development

This year was another busy one on the Official Development Assistance (ODA) front, with a new government, but old problems. We convened over 100 NGOs to call on the government to prevent further UK aid cuts, and we released the first two parts of our series on the state of UK aid. 

We also did lots of work on sustainable economic development, including publishing the report Decolonising economic development: the role of development sector, which lays out what a framework for decolonisation entails, building on anti-colonial, post-colonial and anti-imperialist scholarship, primarily originating in lower-income countries. We are now engaging with NGOs on the contents of this report. 

Locally led

Our locally led work continues to be a huge priority, and we were busy in this area this year. As well as working closely with our working groups, we also helped with the FCDO-WACSI engagement report on localisation of funding, which will be out at the start of 2025 , and hosted a workshop on localisation in humanitarian contexts. 

We also published a number of blogs on the subject from our members and colleagues. 

Safeguarding

Our crucial and ever-popular safeguarding policy templates continued to be used across the world, with further translations published, now totalling seven different languages, and even more coming next year.

We also published tips and outcomes from our five safeguarding skills mapping sessions, which were hosted for small NGOs over the last year.

Anti-racism, equity, diversity and inclusion (AEDI) stock take

Internally, our CEO Romilly Greenhill in her first full year in the post initiated with Bond colleagues an AEDI stock take, which looks into our internal work in the area, and develops a new action plan we aim to share with staff, our board and members in an ongoing project. 

Find out more about our journey here. 

Our new Chair and our colleagues

Last but not least, we welcomed a new Chairperson to Bond’s board. Kirsty Smith was appointed as Bond’s new Board Chair following Bond’s AGM on 20 November. Kirsty succeeded Kate Sayer, who was previously Chair since November 2019. Again, we’d like to thank Kate for all her hard work, and we’re looking forward to working with Kirsty in 2025.

It’s also important to say how proud we are of all Bond colleagues who, without their hard work, none of the above would have been possible. 

We look forward to seeing you all in 2025 and wish you a restful winter break.