Annual Reporting

Our Story in 2024

1. INTRODUCTION & WELCOME

The Trustees present their Annual Report for the Robertson Outdoor Bursary (ROB) for the year ended 31 December 2024.

In our eleventh year of operations ROB continued to deliver its programme of work and build its partnerships to transform the lives of the people in Tanzania, training another 12 awardees to become guides.

Thanks to our partnership with the Exodus Travels Foundation via the Mountain Lioness Project to empower women to become qualified guides on Kilimanjaro, we have now awarded all 30 female scholarships.

2024 was an especially exciting and busy year for us, as we returned to Tanzania to run our second ‘Guide Summit’ at the College of African Wildlife Management and delivered our advanced guide training programme ‘Becoming Even Better’, with the aim of giving ROB awardees additional skills to give them a competitive advantage in the employee market. This is all made possible by our partner Exodus Travels Foundation.

We are looking forward to 2025 with the exciting news that we will be once again partnering with Exodus Travels Foundation to offer another 15 female scholarships over the next 3 years. In addition to this we will also be commissioning another ‘Becoming Even Better Programme’ to run in autumn 2026 which will be offered to previous ROB awardees who are now starting their careers as guides.

We were also delighted to secure funding at the end of 2024 to commission an English language programme specifically for mountain guides in collaboration with Exodus Travels Foundation and a new partner, the International Mountain Explorers Collaborative (IMEC).

Once again our annual Christmas fundraising event at Namaste Sport in Chamonix, France was a great success, and this has now become somewhat of a Chamonix tradition. We also received several individual donations and again thank our regular donors for their continued support. Their constant commitment to what we do really makes a big difference to our awardees in Tanzania.

Our new partnership with Easyfundraising, which provides a UK based free fundraising platform, enabled us to gain donations from supporters when they shop online. We have seen the number of people helping us through this platform grow steadily.

Our journey continues and we promise to continue to grow and adapt to obtain the maximum benefit from every penny our supporters donate to us.

We thank all who are walking this journey with us.

Yvonne Robertson

Chair and founder of Robertson Outdoor Bursary

‘As long as there is a purpose there is no failure’ (Swahili proverb)