for the Period Ended 31 December 2021
Directors report | |
Profit and loss | |
Balance sheet | |
Additional notes | |
Balance sheet notes | |
Community Interest Report |
Directors' report period ended
The directors present their report with the financial statements of the company for the period ended 31 December 2021
Principal activities of the company
Additional information
2021 was an important year for IDEMS, with over 100% turnover growth and pressures that we had not faced before. It feels like we have been tested and made it through to the other side. While we remain extremely fortunate not to have been more severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, it certainly took its toll. With the impacts of long Covid and good staff moving on because they needed a change in lifestyle, we have had to build resilience into our structures while being stretched by rapid growth.While 2021 stretched us to our limit, it also finally established IDEMS as being more than just the director's vision. Bringing the team together at the end of the pandemic was a seminal moment. It felt like a transition between phases with a genuine before and after. Before, we were a micro enterprise starting from nothing with no more than a dream of what we could become. After the meeting, it was as if we were starting anew as a small enterprise with a committed core team ready to build an organisation we believe in that could turn the dream into a reality.The vision behind IDEMS set out an aggressive growth agenda for a social organisation. Now at the end of our fourth year we have averaged over 60% growth while staying in the black and prioritising social impact. We have overcome substantial challenges while achieving this initial growth but have not had to compromise on our vision, quality or ethics to do so. So far the growth has come naturally, through word of mouth, with work coming to us based on our achievements. This puts us in a strong position as we look to the future with ambitions of sustaining such growth for an extended period of time.We recognise that our current approach to growth has served us well, building strong long term partnerships as well as a diverse portfolio. However, this approach has built on our skills and expertise as directors and only been possible because we have been able to intervene and get stuck in when needed on all components of the work. This approach is reaching its limit and we recognise that our continued growth will rely on our ability as directors to transform our roles as we hand over increasing amounts of responsibility to our growing core team. When we started, as directors, we questioned our ability to transition out of academics and into the private sector. Now, four years on we feel we have passed that test with the title of social entrepreneur feeling more comfortable than it used to. It has been a challenging road for us both, with this last year in particular pushing us to the limit. However, we also recognise that this is not the time to sit back, pat ourselves on the back and relax. On the contrary as we enter into 2022 we need to start afresh. The learnings which have got us to this point are a foundation, but the challenges we will face going forward are totally different to those behind us. We need to be ready to reinvent ourselves and our roles to be up to the task of driving IDEMS into its next phase.We enter 2022 looking to consolidate our recent growth and to start a transition process where we flesh out our core team into what we hope become the leadership team of a larger organisation. This is a critical time for IDEMS, where decisions we make now will determine the organisation we become. The timing is not ideal with the long tail of Covid hanging over us all, but we recognise this moment and intend to seize it as best we can, starting with a recruitment push for Social Impact Enablers to diversify our core team.OverviewAbout IDEMSIDEMS International (IDEMS) is a not-for-profit company devoted to Innovations in Development, Education, and the Mathematical Sciences. Our mission is to work collaboratively with diverse partners to enable the evolution of innovations which can impact lives all over the world. IDEMS International was founded in 2018, by mathematical scientists with long term experience working in education and development, looking to achieve wider impact beyond academia. We are passionate about projects related to development, education, and the mathematical sciences, and particularly work that can impact more than one of these areas. As a company we are motivated by our social mission, transparency in our accounting and guided by our principles.IDEMS International is legally registered in the UK as a Community Interest Company. This structure enables us to be defined by the communities we serve while doing business commercially. Serving a community gives us a sense of purpose beyond our own self-interest as individuals, or even as a company.IDEMS International supports and collaborates with INNODEMS, which was established by our partners in Kenya in 2019. INNODEMS follows a similar business model to IDEMS International as a route to creating sustainable opportunities for our Kenyan colleagues. We also support partners in West Africa who are planning to establish similar organisations in their own countries.Our TeamOur team expanded this year with a number of new recruits. We were able to improve our recruitment strategy and became more clear on our recruitment needs, as we brought in experienced technical staff to solidify our team. The recruitment growth was less rapid than in the previous year as we utilised a number of short term contractors to help us respond to the big increase in our work. The increased workload was challenging for our team who were often stretched responding to demands of projects. This coinciding with the stresses of COVID led to some health issues within our team which needed to be respected and responded to with compassion, despite it further increasing the pressures of the work.With the impacts of COVID easing, we were able to hold our first in-person team meeting towards the end of the year, as a week-long retreat at a community centre in the UK. This was an opportunity for many team members to meet face to face for the first time and it was an excellent team bonding experience and led to developing collaborations within our team across projects that don’t usually interact. The meeting was also an opportunity to discuss the wider IDEMS vision, principles and thinking, with another successful outcome being a greater sense of ownership of the company among a number of team members leading to taking up more leadership roles within IDEMS.Looking forward, we are now in a position to recruit a broader set of skills into the team and we ended the year by launching a recruitment for social impact enablers to provide support to our technical team on our large projects.Major activitiesOpen source software development remains our largest area of work. The development of a new version of the Internet of Good Things (IoGT) for UNICEF; a set of websites which make life-saving and life-improving information on maternal health, hygiene, emergency information on diseases, HIV and sexual health advice for adolescents, internet safety, and more available for free even on low-end devices in over eighty countries, was a major focus this year for many in our team. It was challenging, demanding and rewarding work, with many lessons learned in establishing a successful relationship with UNICEF. We also expect this to lead to new opportunities and continued relationships with UNICEF and their partners.Consultancy contracts remained as a core component of our work as we continued ongoing relationships with our collaborators. A highlight has been supporting the University of Oxford in their Covid-19 Emergency Response in South Africa as part of our ongoing work on Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) Digital to get digital parenting resources for families. This has enabled us to be part of important work responding to emerging challenges caused by the pandemic and further established the collaboration with the University of Oxford and our commitment to supporting the aims of the PLH project.We continued our commitment to community work, which remained as largely remote support this year. We continued to support the development and implementation of “Virtual Maths Camps” with the charity Supporting African Maths Initiatives (SAMI). We were also able to support Maseno University to institutionalise the use of electronic assessment to support improved student engagement and feedback, particularly for large classes. In particular, we provided funds to ensure their Moodle e-learning site remained up to date and active and funded a teaching support assistant to develop electronic resources for mathematics courses.FinancesIDEMS International ended year four with a small surplus for the fourth consecutive year. Our turnover increased by over 100% to £645,000 with a surplus of £6,700 after impact investments. Our full accounts are provided for transparency.We continue to utilise loans to support cash flow, including a coronavirus Bounce Back Loan, and recognised the need to develop a long term investment strategy to support continued growth.We expanded our team in response to increased work with both staff and subcontractor costs increasing substantially from last year. Travel costs remained low compared to pre-pandemic levels, with many of the changes to our ways of operating since the pandemic continuing.Creditors amounts and cash in hand remain high as we are currently holding multi-year grant funds in a dedicated account, which includes unspent funds due to Covid disruptions and are now beginning to be spent.We continued to invest in education activities, largely in Africa, as continued responses to Covid, but our largest investment of the year related to UNICEF’s Internet of Good Things which we see as a strategic long term investment.Reflection pointsWe are recruiting the right kind of peopleOur first week-long team meeting highlighted that IDEMS is now building a strong core team that extended way beyond the directors. We consciously shifted our recruitment strategy to include more experienced people motivated by the social impact and flexibility we can offer. This complemented the existing successful approach of attracting young academics who want to be intellectually challenged while contributing towards positive social change. The mix of people who now form part of our team are a foundation we feel we can build from with confidence. We recognise there are still big gaps, but not only is that to be expected from a growing organisation at our stage, we feel we know who we are looking for to fill those gaps.UNICEF is an opportunity and a challengeThis year has seen us engaged by UNICEF to develop the second version of the Internet of Good Things. This project has been without doubt our most challenging to date. We were ill prepared for the formality of working with such a partner and underestimated how demanding they would be to work with. However, the more we engage with the process the more we understand what an opportunity this sort of partnership can provide, for future work, of course, but more importantly as a route to achieve impact at scale. The value and pitfalls of subcontractorsThe growth and challenging deadlines we faced this year required us to call on subcontractors at numerous occasions to supplement our team. We learnt a lot from this process and were surprised by what we were able to find. Most notably a young team of developers in Pakistan who are now becoming long term collaborators. As we expected, not all our experiences with subcontractors were wholly good, with many providing short term fixes that we knew we would have to redo when we had the time. However, the experience cemented the fact that we could find and call on people at short notice to supplement our team when we really needed it and that we only want to do it when we have to.Looking aheadWe finish the year extremely happy with the team we have in place and optimistic about upcoming recruitment to bring a greater diversity of skill sets into the team. In 2022, we hope to consolidate the position we are in after the transformation that took place this year. Some growth is expected in the year ahead, with a big, new, long-term contract based on our PLH work starting in April 2022. This supports us in solidifying our work for the future, and we have also started recruitment to bring more people into this team. However, we are not expecting the rapid growth we saw last year, and plan to use this time to settle into the organisation we have become and prepare for the next growth phase ahead.
Directors
The directors shown below have held office during the whole of the period from
1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021
The above report has been prepared in accordance with the special provisions in part 15 of the Companies Act 2006
This report was approved by the board of directors on
And signed on behalf of the board by:
Name:
Status: Director
for the Period Ended
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The notes form part of these financial statements
This report was approved by the board of directors on
and signed on behalf of the board by:
Name:
Status: Director
The notes form part of these financial statements
for the Period Ended 31 December 2021
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The company has carried out a wide range of projects and activities this year related todevelopment, education and the mathematical sciences. During the financial year ending 31December 2021 the companies activities have benefited the community in the follow ways:We support projects in agroecology in Africa. In Kenya, we continue to support anAgroecology Hub, aiming to support local organisations to develop the necessary structuresthat could enable them to support the wider farming community across East Africa through theuse of effective agroecological approaches. Activities began to pick up again after thedisruption caused by the Covid pandemic. This year we have particularly supported RuralFarmers Research and Development Network, a small holder farmers organisation, tointegrate into the Hub activities and better support their farmers. We supported workshopsand training for small holder farmers in agroecological practices. We have conducted researchto further understand agroecology practices, including collection of soil samples for analysis,and surveys of farmer practices. We have developed video and audio resources for farmers.We also continued to support improvements to the Manor House Agricultural Centreinfrastructure including a new solar power system.In West Africa, we continue to provide research methods support to agriculture researchprojects, which has remained largely remote. These projects are improving access to local,sustainable, nutritious food through collaborative research and knowledge-sharing withsmallholder famers, research institutions and development organisations. They have anoverarching aim to explore solutions for sustainable, local food systems to improve the lives ofpeople in some of the poorest parts of the world. We support these projects in all aspects ofresearch methods (statistics and data).We have developed a number of open source software in this year.We developed a new version of the Internet of Good Things (IoGT) for UNICEF. IoGT is aUNICEF initiative and set of websites which make life-saving and life-improving information(maternal health, hygiene, emergency information on diseases, HIV and sexual health advicefor adolescents, internet safety, positive parenting techniques and more) available for freeeven on low-end devices in over eighty countries. IoGT includes multimedia elements andtwo-way communication features, used to capture feedback and local best practices fromcommunities. The sites are in use around the world providing support, particularly for youngpeople.We continue to collaborate with the University of Oxford to develop Parenting of LifelongHealth (PLH) Digital. Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) is a suite of open access,noncommercial parenting workshop programmes, developed by the University of Oxford andother collaborators, including WHO, Clowns Without Borders South Africa (CWBSA), UNICEFand the University of Cape Town, South Africa. We are leading the development of the app inthis long-term project and including multiple co-development and testing cycles acrosscountries with a formal randomised controlled trial to support rigorous evidence and researchoutputs. During this year, initial versions of the app have been developed and are starting tobe in use. We continue to provide capacity building within the project to enable our partners inKenya to contribute to the software development of the app and take a key role in the project.As well as the app, we are also developing a chatbot system, which provides parentinginformation and support via an automated system. The chatbot, known as ParentText, is partof the suite of PLH resources.We continue to support work in the areas of climate and climate change through open sourcesoftware. We support the development of Climsoft: a free, climate database managementsoftware for use by national meteorological services around the world. We are a partner in thedevelopment of OpenCDMS, a World Meteorological Organisation initiative working toaddress Earth system data management needs of developing and developed countries. Wecontinue to develop free tools to analyse climatic data through an easy to use click and pointsoftware (R-Instat). Our variety of climate projects aim to improve understanding of climateand climate change among researchers, government organisations, farmers and others withthe aim of supporting more informed decision making in adapting and tackling changes inclimate.This year we have supported several education initiatives. With the UK charity SupportingAfrican Maths Initiatives (SAMI) we continue to develop and support the Virtual Maths Campproject. Virtual Maths Camps is an idea to turn the challenges presented by the COVID-19pandemic into opportunities, and continue to provide a maths camp experience for students,teachers, and facilitators from across the globe - in a new, dynamic, partially virtual and fullyinternational environment. IDEMS has been a partner since the beginning of this project andhas been involved in all aspects of the design. Further to the events last year, we havecontinued to support improvements to the Virtual Maths Camp card deck, which can be usedto run maths activities and sessions. Some of this work led to a new collaboration withmEducation Alliance in developing a program for maths ambassadors. Maths ambassadorswill be trained (initially in Kenya) to deliver fun and engaging maths activities in localcommunities, including with the Virtual Maths Camp card deck. We have collaborated withmEducation Alliance to develop this program and will be trialled next year.
This year remained challenging for much of our community. We actively engaged withselected stakeholders from our community and made efforts to support them in addressingtheir relevant issuesIDEMS has continued to support and engage with the UK charity SAMI and the Kenyan NGOAMI. We continued to support them in running Virtual Maths Camps due to the inability to holdphysical maths camps across Africa. We have provided SAMI with ongoing support in thedevelopment of resources for the Virtual Maths Camp which IDEMS made substantial stafftime available towards this effort. Early in 2021, SAMI requested support in furthering theirTheory of Change. IDEMS ran sessions to do this, following previous sessions held in 2020,again, at no cost to SAMI. Involvement in this process ensures that we continue to understandhow the company can best support SAMI in improving mathematics education across Africa.We continued to support our new stakeholder, INNODEMS, a not-for-profit companyestablished in Kenya and set up with a similar structure to IDEMS International. We involveINNODEMS in many of our projects, which develops their skills and experience, and wecontinue to capacity support their junior staff. Through our support, we aim to enableINNODEMS to offer their services locally in Kenya in support of development in the country.We continued to support Maseno University, Kenya in the use of electronic assessmentresources for large mathematics classes to improve student experience and engagement. Wecontributed substantial staff time to this at no cost to Maseno University. We ensure thatresources developed are released under open licences which means they can be reused andadapted by others, therefore increasing the reach of what is developed.We continued to have consultation with agriculture, ecology and farmer-based organisationsin East Africa as part of the Agroecology Hub project. IDEMS supports an Agroecology Hub,which was established in 2018 at Manor House Agricultural Centre, Kitale, Kenya. Thiscommunity is looking to work together on using Farmer Research Network approaches tobuild the scientific knowledge base while engaging farming communities with agroecologicalpractices. After the disruptions of the Covid pandemic, this year we have been able toexpand the network of partners, and we now support an additional rural farmers organisationin being part of the Hub. There was a demand for workshops following the break of the Covidpandemic and we supported the host centre, Manor House, to safely run in-person workshopsto enable partners to meet physically, for more farmers to be trained, and enable sharing ofpractices and cross learning.
The aggregate amount of emoluments paid to or receivable by directors in respect ofqualifying services was £68,877.The value of company contributions paid to a pension scheme in respect of directors’qualifying services was £12,398.There were no other transactions or arrangements in connection with the remuneration ofdirectors or compensation for director’s loss of office which require to be disclosed.Full details are provided in the company’s accounts.
No transfer of assets other than for full consideration
This report was approved by the board of directors on
28 September 2022
And signed on behalf of the board by:
Name: D Parsons
Status: Director