Background
Letter from the Founder
Anonddo's Accounts
You can be sure that the money you donate to Anonddo goes directly to the students and families in need in Bangladesh. There is no expensive bureaucracy, office overheads or staff salaries to pay. Indeed one of the founding principles of Anonddo is that £40 is all we need to give one child education for a year. It is simple as that.
Between 1990 and1995 we started helping impoverished Bangladeshi students from Sylhet, a region in the East of Bangladesh, with money for their education. Secondary schooling for girls is funded by the government but boys need to pay for their own education and many drop out due to lack of funds. This perpetuates the viscous circle of poverty and a lack of education. Here at Anonddo we hope to break this cycle by giving children the opportunity of an education and a way out of poverty for them and their families. We do this by sending money to our relatives in Sylhet which they then gave directly to the families to help with some of the costs of education. This was an informal arrangement between my family and our friends in Bangladesh.
In 1995 I wanted to make this more formal and on the 7th November I held a public meeting for the Bangladeshi community in London. This was the start of Anonddo – which means happy or smiling in Bengali. We hoped that through our efforts there would be more students with smiling faces.
The purpose of Anonddo is therefore to help with the costs of secondary education for impoverished students in Bangladesh – these costs include school fees, books, stationary, uniform and travel costs.
Anonddo has no religious or political affiliations and there are no conditions for students to be able to receive sponsorship. Anonddo is run out of my family home and relies on the voluntary contributions of a number of friends and volunteers. The small and simple scale of Anonddo means that your money is going directly to the recipients and not being lost in a mass of bureaucracy as can happen with the larger charities. Professor Shahgir Bokhth Farook (London) has been involved since the beginning and over the last year Peter Burns and Stephen Ingle have been invaluable as local advisors. Shara Routledge also helps on a regular basis and we are hoping to recruit more volunteers for book-keeping and accounts – so if anyone knows anyone?! Anonddo is a registered company and we have applied to the Charity Commission for charitable status. (check this status)
We already have a support group working for Anonddo in Sylhet and are hopeful that our new Chipping Norton support group will prove to be as successful.
"My name is Tahirul Hasan. I and my family came to Britain when I was 18 and we moved to Chipping Norton in 1990. My wife and I have three children aged 16, 8 and 6 months. We are now very happy and settled in Chipping Norton but our early years were quite a struggle, mainly because I didn't have the benefit of a full education. During this time I realised the importance of education and began to want to help young people in my country. My main occupation is running the restaurant but in my spare time my greatest enjoyment comes from doing what I can to help those less fortunate than myself – and this includes both the British Bangladesh community as well as those from my home country."
The accounts of Anonddo are very simple. The in-goings are all charitable
donations from sponsors and donors. The only out-goings are direct costs
to the charity such as stationary and postage, lawyers fees and the hiring
of halls for meetings. Neither Hasan nor any or the volunteers receive
any money for our work and we cover our own travel costs for all our meetings.
During the last financial year Anonddo received £xx in donations,
paid out £xx in costs and sent £xx to Bangladesh for sponsoring
students. More detailed company accounts will be available to the public
shortly.
