As a part of today's Budget announcements, the Chancellor has announced that Zimbabwe A National Emergency (ZANE) will receive £1.3million – after Robert Courts MP highlights the important work of the charity in Parliament.
The grant, funded by the LIBOR charity funding scheme, will enable ZANE to support 583 Commonwealth ex-Servicemen, women and widows living in extreme poverty in Zimbabwe.
Last week, Robert Courts urged the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, to ensure that during this period of political instability in Zimbabwe, much-needed aid from charities such as Witney-based ZANE still gets through.
ZANE aims to provide the most effective way possible for donors to help people in Zimbabwe, seeking to relive invisible and visible suffering. This includes working with pensioners, helping to develop communities through small business training and development, and through carefully chosen partnerships to alleviate clubfoot, provide hearing aids and prosthetic limbs for land mine victims.
Robert said: "This investment will provide invaluable support to many people in Zimbabwe who are all too often forgotten. I am proud to have played a small part in raising the profile of this wonderful charity by raising the issue with the Foreign Secretary. It is essential that much-needed aid continues to get through to those who need it during this time of political upheaval."
Tom Benyon, founder of ZANE, said: "The people in Zimbabwe would want to thank Robert Courts for his wholehearted support of the charity ZANE, based in his constituency, particularly for the £1.3m grant that that the charity has just been awarded by the Treasury. We are lucky to have Robert Courts MP working hard for us in parliament."