Annual Reporting

Our Story in 2025

1. INTRODUCTION & WELCOME

The Trustees present their Annual Report for the Robertson Outdoor Bursary (ROB) for the year ended 31 December 2025.

In our twelfth 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 ten awardees to gain their guide licence.

We were happy to continue our partnership with the Exodus Travels Foundation announcing a Phase two of the Mountain Lioness Scholarships which will train a further fifteen women over the next three years and to start planning another ‘Becoming Even Better Programme’ which is we are currently planning to run in 2027. Places will be offered to previous ROB awardees to enhance their skills. This year we developed a new initiative with our partners Exodus Travels Foundation to offer our women awardees a pre-training summit experience to further support their preparedness for their end of training field exam.

The mountain guide English language programme commissioned in 2024 in collaboration with Exodus Travels Foundation and the International Mountain Explorers Collaborative (IMEC) has been a key focus of our work in 2025. Developing and testing the course curriculum ready for a more extensive rollout in 2026.

Our Christmas fundraising event at Namaste Sport in Chamonix, France, was a great success, and has now become an annual Chamonix tradition with residents and their friends. This year we also received several individual donations, and we 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.

We continue to receive donations via Easyfundraising a UK based free fundraising platform, enabling us to gain donations from supporters when they shop online. We have seen the number of people supporting us through this platform grow steadily.

Our journey continues and we keep our promise 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)