By Alison Darcy, CUFA Project Officer
With CUFA’s first Annual General Meeting to be held next month, we would like to thank all our amazing supporters who over the last year helped us deliver our projects across the Asia Pacific region.
Our work would not be possible without the generous support from the Australian Government, our members, a range of corporate donors, individuals and mutuals. Without your support we wouldn’t be able to deliver the sustainable development programs that have reached over 4 million people and changed the lives of so many across the Asia Pacific region.
While it’s not possible to thank everyone individually (although we’d love to), we’d like to extend a special thanks to our in-country partners, Community Investors, Challenger Participants, MAD Day hosts, Australian and overseas volunteers, Board members, International Development Working Group Committee members, community members within our project sites and of course our dedicated staff in Australia, Cambodia, Fiji, Myanmar and Timor-Leste.
Every day you help us to achieve our vision – for communities of the Asia Pacific region to be free of poverty through economic development and self-determination.
2013-14 was another exciting year for CUFA with a number of changes and expansion and with your help some of key highlights include:
- Educating 12,248 children on financial literacy helping them to better understand about money, income sources, savings, budgeting, financial goals and their local credit union, helping more than 7,000 students increase their savings over the past year.
- Achieving tremendous growth in both membership and savings in financial cooperatives in both Cambodia and Timor-Leste with member numbers increasing by 311% in Cambodia and member savings increasing by 229% in Timor-Leste.
- Supporting 375 families who have been resettled by the Cambodian railways project, helping 76% of families to reduce their debt levels over the past year.
- Providing professional and personal development opportunities to 114 credit union professionals from 11 countries to attend the Pacific Credit Union Technical Congress.
- Delivering technical assistance to six Pacific Island countries and credit union movements, in areas where an estimated 70%* of Pacific Islanders do not have access to basic financial services; assisting them to build their operational capacity and implement new systems and processes to help them operate their credit unions more efficiently and effectively.
- Gaining registration in Myanmar. This will allow us to further our operations and implement an in-country office rather than assisting under the umbrella of a partner organisation.
To our supporters, we would like to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2014-15 year. We could not have achieved such great heights of success without your continued support and we look forward to partnering together in the years ahead, as together we work to improve the lives of those living on less than $2 a day in communities across the Asia Pacific region.
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After being a subsidiary organisation for over 40 years, CUFA will hold it’s first annual general meeting on 13 October 2014, following our first year as an independent entity.
