The Work of Human Appeal

Most large things begin smaller than the story remembers.

In 1991, two volunteers started Human Appeal from a small flat in Manchester. There were no offices, no campaigns, no annual reports. There was an idea that is older than any charity: that the suffering of a stranger is your concern, and that doing something about it is not optional.

The names of those two volunteers are not published anywhere we could find, and we have chosen not to invent them. That feels right, somehow. The charity they started has always been less about who is in front of it than about who is behind it — the field teams, the local committees, the people who show up in places most organisations have already left.

More than three decades later, the flat has become an organisation working in 30 countries, with an income of £90.2 million in 2024. But the shape of the thing has not really changed. It still comes down to the same question it started with: someone needs help, and who is going to go.

It is easy to say a charity "helps people." It is harder, and more honest, to say exactly how.

Human Appeal's work falls into a handful of plain, practical things. Each of them sounds modest written down. Each of them, done at scale and done for years, changes the arithmetic of a person's life.

There is clean water — wells and water points built to last, with a local committee trained to maintain them long after the donation is forgotten. A single well, the charity says, brings clean water to around 105 people — something most of us never think about until we have to walk hours for it.

There is the care of orphaned children — not a one-off gift but a monthly commitment that keeps a child fed, sheltered, in good health and, crucially, in school. In 2024, Human Appeal reported sponsoring 35,607 orphans across 14 countries.

There is the rhythm of seasonal giving — Ramadan, Zakat, and Qurbani, the sacrifice at Eid al-Adha that turns into fresh meat for families who rarely see it. Across its Ramadan, Qurbani and winter campaigns in 2024, the charity reported reaching 1,812,689 people.

There is emergency response — Gaza, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan, wherever the news cycle points and, more importantly, wherever it has already moved on. There is healthcare, including a hospital in northern Syria that keeps its doors open through bombings and earthquakes. And there is the slower work of livelihoods — the training, tools and seeds that turn aid into independence, so that a family needs the charity less next year than this one.

We have written about each of these in depth. They are not the whole of the work. They are the parts of it that, once you understand them, you do not forget.

Charities are judged on numbers, and they know it. That creates a temptation — to round up, to use the biggest figure on the page, to let "more than" do a lot of quiet work. We have tried to resist it on Human Appeal's behalf, because the real numbers are strong enough.

Start with the one that is not Human Appeal's to choose. Its income in 2024 was £90.2 million, and that figure is not marketing — it is filed with the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the independent regulator, alongside the charity's audited accounts. Anyone can check it. We would rather lead with a number someone else verified than one the charity verified itself.

The reach figures are the charity's own, and we have marked them as such throughout. In its 2024 annual report, Human Appeal reported helping 6,240,711 people across 30 countries. In 2025, it reported reaching more than 7.3 million. These are large, self-reported numbers, and large self-reported numbers deserve a little scepticism by default — which is exactly why, where we quote one, we tell you it is the charity's own and we tell you the year.

There is one more number worth holding. Human Appeal has set itself a target of investing £250 million to reach 10 million people. Whether it gets there is a question for the future. That it is the kind of thing the charity now thinks about — having started in a flat — is the measure of how far the work has travelled.

The most impressive thing about Human Appeal is not the scale. It is the parts of the work that are designed to outlast the giving.

When the charity builds a well, it does not build and leave. It trains a local committee to maintain it and sets up a small community fund for repairs, so the water keeps flowing for years. When it sponsors an orphan, the condition is that the child stays in school, because the point is not to feed a child today but to give them a life that does not need feeding tomorrow.

This is the idea Muslims call Sadaqah Jariyah — an ongoing charity, a gift that keeps giving long after the giver has stopped thinking about it. You do not have to share the faith to recognise the wisdom in it. A meal helps today. A well, a school place, a trade — those help for a generation.

It is a quieter ambition than emergency relief, and a harder one to photograph. But it is the part of the work that tells you whether a charity is thinking in news cycles or in lifetimes.

We should be honest about who is writing this and why.

Sports Legends Media represents Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis — the legends behind the Sultans of Swing galas — and we are proud to partner with Human Appeal in support of its work. The galas raise money for the charity's humanitarian appeals. That is the relationship, plainly stated.

We are not Human Appeal, and we do not speak for it or for the people it serves. We are admirers who happened to be close enough to the work to want to write it down properly. The figures here are the charity's own, sourced and dated; if you give, you give to Human Appeal directly, not through us.

We tell the story because a gala is a single night, and the work it supports is not. It is easy to attend an evening, applaud a legend, and never quite learn what the cause behind the cause actually does. This is our attempt to close that gap — to make sure the name on the invitation means something specific by the time you leave.