Energy chief to give £3m to Rwandan tea farmers

Sir Ian Wood, the head of energy giant the Wood Group, established the £50m Wood Family Trust four years ago. And the new package of £3.7m in funding will bring the total committed from the trust to £10.2 million since 2007.

The majority of the new funding investment – £3m – is to be spent on a six-year project, named Imbarutso, to aid 30,000 tea farmers in Rwanda by increasing their yield and income. The £3m investment from the Wood Family trust is being matched with £3m from Lord David Sainsbury’s charitable foundation, Gatsby.

The trust already supports an initiative to develop tea farming by small holders in Tanzania.

The Wood Family Trust is planning to invest the remainder of the funding package in initiatives to combat youth unemployment in Scotland and to provide overseas volunteering opportunities for teachers to help develop global citizenship across Scotland.

Sir Ian, who is chairman of the trust, said: “I feel my generation has done very badly in terms of trying to take a global view of key problems and also in terms of trying to help tackle some of the extreme hardship and despair problems that exist in certain parts of the world. But you can do something about it.”

He continued: “We will only have made a tiny, tiny impact – but that is a lot better than doing nothing at all.”