ANNUAL REPORT 2024
A community-led human rights organisation focused on Eritrea and Eritrean refugees registered in England and Wales (1198077)
TABLE OF CONTENT
Who we are.................................................3 Foreword.....................................................4 Activities..................................................5-7 Financial overview.................................8 Governance and management...........9 Trustees.....................................................10 Accounts.............................................11-12 Trustee Declaration................................13
WHO WE ARE
One Day Seyoum (ODS) is a community-led organisation focused on human rights abuses in Eritrea and against Eritrean refugees. We organise campaigns and publish research to push for change. We produce media, art and events to raise awareness about the issues we work on. We run support programmes helping Eritrean refugees with asylum-related issues, mental health and professional development. We organise capacity building initiatives to increase the strength of the movement.
A decade since its founding, ODS is one of the most prominent Eritrean human rights organisations in exile. We have over 500 members and combine virtual and in-person activities to achieve impact. Our membership mostly comprises of young people (18-35 years old) and are a mix of Eritrea and diaspora-born Eritreans, and allies. ODS focuses heavily on community engagement and has provided a unique space for people across the movement to learn and get involved.
We are regularly invited to speak and collaborate by institutions like the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and news organisations like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera.
FOREWORD
In 2024, we continued One Day Seyoum’s journey of professionalising the organisation. I left my job at Amnesty International to focus on this full-time and truly give this process the dedication and time it required. One of my greatest joys from the year was assembling our executive team. All of them are long-term ODS members and it has been such a privilege to work with them to strengthen an organisation we all love dearly. All team members worked closely with me on the process of formalising the organisation through building internal structures, writing our strategy and fundraising. They were also in charge of a programme each and developed the long-term plans for that programme in our strategy process and ran all the activities for it in 2024. Seeing this kind of dedication, whilst they are balancing work and education, was very inspiring and a great reminder of the immense passion that exists for Eritrea and just needs to be facilitated.
Taking ODS on this transition has not been easy, but we are more motivated than ever to achieve our goals. We are convinced that Eritrea needs an organisation like ours - both now and in the future, and are determined to build a foundation that will ensure that we can fulfill that role sustainably and long-term.
We had initially hoped to pause programmes and focus on building a strong foundation first, but it became evident very early that this would not be possible. Many of the issues on which we work are urgent but neglected - there is just not enough interest and resources to address them the way we do. The many successes we had in 2024 was a great reminder of the importance of ODS’s existence.
Thank you to everyone who makes ODS’s work possible. We cannot wait to continue building this organisation and achieving the kind of impact the Eritrean people deserve.
Vanessa Tsehaye Founder and Executive Director
ACTIVITIES
Campaigns
Stop deporting Eritrean refugees from Turkey: In August 2024, we received reports that hundreds of Eritreans were detained in a town in Turkey called Aydin and that they had no access to asylum procedures and that another large group had been deported to Eritrea in June. A few days after we started documenting the issue and speaking to relatives, we found out over 300 Eritrean refugees had been deported from Turkey to Eritrea. Our team contacted the United Nations, Amnesty International and a local human rights organisation and started an informal coalition to respond to the situation. We interviewed relatives and were eventually able to speak to Eritrean refugees who were detained and documented how bad the conditions and treatment inside the detention facility were not meeting international standards. We also interviewed relatives of the deported individuals and were able to confirm how many had been taken and where they were being held. Together with Amnesty International, we launched a mass campaign targeting the Turkish government to stop deportations and to improve conditions. The United Nations used our information to lobby the Turkish government directly. We put the local Turkish organisation in touch with detainees and they visited them in prison. Their visits and advocacy led to improved conditions in some aspects, including more phone calls for the detainees. The Turkish government eventually replied to the United Nations acknowledging these deportations for the first time. They have not conducted any deportations since.
Free Ciham: We continued to campaign for the release of Ciham Ali and for the US government to intervene in her case. In December 2024, we conducted an advocacy mission to Washington DC with the support of Amnesty International. We planned the mission to coincide with the anniversary of Ciham’s arrest. We started off with a meeting at the State Department to hand over the 450,000 signatures we had collected for Ciham in the past years. We then met with three congressional offices to discuss her case. On the 12 year anniversary of Ciham’s arrest, we gathered a group at the Lincoln Memorial with a banner that said ‘Free Ciham’ to commemorate the day. The event was attended and covered by journalists from Voice of America and the TV channel ERIPM that transmits to Eritrea via satellite.
Protect Eritreans refugees in the UK: We did several campaigns to support Eritrean refugees in the UK. We continued to campaign for safe and legal routes to the UK to prevent avoidable deaths that Eritrean refugees have to face when they are forced to escape the dictatorship. I highlighted these calls on BBC News through a live interview that I did in September 2024 after several Eritreans tragically died whilst trying to cross to the UK. We also ran a big campaign In July 2024 when there were coordinated violent attacks by anti-immigration rioters who were targeting asylum seekers. The rioters had chosen one day to target a large amount of asylum seekers' accommodations and whilst there was much information circulating to inform and protect refugees overall, none of it was in Tigrinya (the main Eritrean official language). We produced posters with crucial information in Tigrinya that we circulated on social media and through Eritrean media channels. We made a video that had over 300,000 views across social media. We put together a group of volunteers from our members community to answer questions we received on social media from Eritrean refugees, including finding safe places.
ACTIVITIES
Support Eritrean refugees in Sudan: We continued to raise and distribute funds to Eritrean refugees from the fundraiser we launched in 2023 after the war broke out in Sudan. In 2024, we distributed a total of 6080 GBP.
Political prisoners in Eritrea: We continued to campaign for Eritrean political prisoners by highlighting their cases on key anniversaries such as 18 September.
Capacity-building
In December 2023, we launched our capacity-building program with a pilot activity in Uganda. In 2024, we started planning the rest of the programme using learnings from our pilot activity. We conducted a survey and feedback call with the participants in the pilot activity. We also had extensive brainstorm sessions amongst ourselves and with external experienced programmers.
Magazine
We run a magazine called 2001 magazine , named after the year the free press was shut down in Eritrea. The goal of our magazine is to create informative, thought provoking and engaging content that will inform our audiences about the key issues we work on and motivate them to get involved. Our inaugural issue was published in 2021 and featured pieces from leading Eritrean writers, artists, and activists, as well as allies to our cause, who have all created work around the theme: "The Past, Present, and Future of Eritrea." The magazine received overwhelmingly positive feedback and was profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review. By 2024, we had sold 332 copies.
Communications
We have continued to use different social media platforms to fulfill our organisational goals of raising more awareness about the crisis in Eritrea and to engage audiences with our campaigns. In 2024, we saw a strong increase in our engagements especially as we posted more on TikTok. A majority of our new members cited in their membership application that they found us through TikTok.
Speaking engagements
We have continued to raise awareness about the Eritrean crisis and recruit more people to our movement by participating in different kinds of events across the world. In September 2024, our executive director Vanessa Tsehaye led a campaigning workshop at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates and used our work on Eritrea as a case study. In February 2024, she gave a talk at the Cooper Series Symposium ‘Africa Is Rising’ at Swarthmore College focused on the Eritrean crisis and her work with One Day Seyoum. She also led a campaigning workshop further engaging students with the key aspects of our work.
ACTIVITIES
Community mobilisation
We have continued to cultivate a community of members that is knowledgeable, passionate and willing to get involved. By December 2024, we had 598 members. We regularly have online members meetings to bring together our members to get to know each other, to inform them on issues and ways to get involved and to have interesting discussions amongst one another. Sometimes the meetings are themed and sometimes they are just general. We continued to organise book club meetings and for one of the meetings, we had a special guest speaker to further enrich the discussion. We were reading “My country Eritrea” by Abrehe Berhe, the former finance minister who had been imprisoned without trial since 2018 and we were lucky to have his son join the meeting. Abrehe tragically passed away a few months after.
Operations
One of our key activities in 2024 was continuing to build the infrastructure of the organisation. Our long-term goal is to go from being a volunteer run organisation to becoming funded and staffed. In 2024, we finished recruitment for our executive team. We have always had active members and decided to conduct a recruitment process to ensure that we had a dedicated team focused on taking the organisation through this transition. Together, we worked on our five-year strategy, built internal processes, worked on our fundraising and overall planning work. Each executive team member is in charge of a programme and ran those operations at the same time as we worked on the long-term work specified in this section.
FINANCIAL OVERVIEW
Our total income was 1029 GBP and this came from our Sudan fundraiser.
Our expenditure was 7937 GBP. These costs covered our relief work in Sudan, costs for our website, email marketing service for our members, a shared working space and travel costs associated with advocacy and a conference. Since a vast majority of the income only was for our relief work in Sudan, we used the reserves from the previous year to cover all other expenses.
Our remaining cash funds at the end of the financial year were 1499 GBP.
GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT
Our governing document is a 'constitution of a Charitable Incorporated Organisation whose only voting members are its charity trustees.
There must be at least three charity trustees. If the number falls below this minimum, the remaining trustee or trustees may act only to call a meeting of the charity trustees, or appoint a new charity trustee. The maximum number of charity trustees is 10. The charity trustees may not appoint any charity trustee if as a result the number of charity trustees would exceed the maximum.
Apart from the first charity trustees, every trustee must be appointed [for a term of 2 years] by a resolution passed at a properly convened meeting of the charity trustees.In selecting individuals for appointment as charity trustees, the charity trustees must have regard to the skills, knowledge and experience needed for the effective administration of the CIO.
A charity trustee ceases to hold office if he or she: (a) retires by notifying the CIO in writing (but only if enough charity trustees will remain in office when the notice of resignation takes effect to form a quorum for meetings); (b) is absent without the permission of the charity trustees from all their meetings held within a period of six months and the trustees resolve that his or her office be vacated; (c) dies; (d) in the written opinion, given to the company, of a registered medical practitioner treating that person, has become physically or mentally incapable of acting as a director and may remain so for more than three months; (e) is disqualified from acting as a charity trustee by virtue of sections 178180 of the Charities Act 2011 (or any statutory re-enactment or modification of that provision).
Any person retiring as a charity trustee is eligible for reappointment.
TRUSTEES
During the period 2023, the following persons were trustees:
Andom Ghebreghiorgis - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022. Haben Fecadu - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022. Andrew Gregg - Appointed as trustee on 28/02/2022.
| One Day Seyoum |
One Day Seyoum |
One Day Seyoum |
One Day Seyoum |
1198077 | CC16a | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Receipts and payments accounts | ||||||
| For the period from |
01/01/2024 | To | 31/12/2024 | |||
| Section A Receipts and payments | ||||||
| Unrestricted funds to the nearest £ A1 Receipts |
Restricted funds to the nearest £ |
Endowment funds to the nearest £ |
Total funds to the nearest £ |
Last year to the nearest £ |
||
| - 1,029- |
||||||
| Sub total(Gross income for AR) A2 Asset and investment sales, (see table). |
- 1,029- |
- 8,359- |
||||
| A2 Asset and investment sales, (see table). |
||||||
| - -- |
- -- - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
|||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
|||
| Sub total- -- Total receipts - -- A3 Payments Technology (website, email marketing) - 524- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
|
| - -- |
- 1,029- |
- -- |
- 1,029- |
- 8,359- |
||
| Technology (website, email marketing) | - 524- |
- 524- |
- 693- |
|||
| Office | - 531- |
- 531- |
||||
| Advocacy | - 430- |
- 430- |
||||
| Conference | - 372- |
- 372- |
||||
| Relief work | ||||||
| - 6,080- |
- 6,080- |
- 2,001- |
||||
| Travel expenses | - 410- |
|||||
| Freelancers | - 15,625- |
|||||
| Sub total - 1,857- A4 Asset and investment purchases, (see table) |
- 1,857- |
- 6,080- |
- -- |
- 7,937- |
- 18,729- |
|
| A4 Asset and investment purchases, (see table) |
||||||
| - -- |
- -- - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
|||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||||
| Sub total - -- Total payments - 1,857- Net of receipts/(payments) - 1,857- A5 Transfers between funds - -- A6 Cash funds last year end - -- Cash funds this year end - 1,857- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - 1,857- |
- 6,080- |
- -- |
- 7,937- |
- 18,729- |
||
| - 1,857- |
- 5,051- |
- -- |
- 3,194- |
- 10,370- |
||
| - -- |
- -- - -- - 5,051- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
- -- |
|||
| - 1,857- |
- -- |
- 3,194- |
- 10,370- |
|||
| Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period | ||||||
| Categories B1 Cash funds |
Details Remaining cash funds from previous years |
Unrestricted funds to nearest £ |
Restricted funds to nearest £ |
Endowment funds to nearest £ |
||
| - 1,499- |
- -- |
|||||
| - -- |
- -- |
|||||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||||
| Total cash funds | - 1,499- |
- -- |
- -- |
|||
| (agree balances with receipts and payments account (s)) |
Section B Statement of assets and liabilities at the end of the period
| Unrestricted | Unrestricted | Restricted funds | Restricted funds | Endowment | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Categories | Details | funds | funds | ||||||||||||||
| to nearest £ | to nearest £ | to nearest £ | |||||||||||||||
| B1 | Cash | funds | Remaining cash funds from previous years | - | 1,499- | - | -- | ||||||||||
| - | -- | - | -- | ||||||||||||||
| - | -- | - | -- | - | -- | ||||||||||||
| Total cash funds | - | 1,499- | - | -- | - | -- | |||||||||||
| (agree balances with receipts and payments account | |||||||||||||||||
| (s)) |
CCXX R1 accounts (SS)
1/28/2026 Doc ID: e2076e746d800bcf092fd73a62c7ba714ec00056
1
| B2 Other monetary assets B3 Investment assets B4 Assets retained for the charity’s own use B5 Liabilities Signed by one or two trustees on behalf of all the trustees |
Details | Unrestricted funds to nearest £ |
Restricted funds to nearest £ |
Endowment funds to nearest £ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| - -- |
- -- |
- -- |
||
| Current value (optional) |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| Current value (optional) |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| - -- |
||||
| When due (optional) |
||||
| Date of approval | ||||
| 29 / 01 / 2026 | ||||
| 30 / 01 / 2026 |
CCXX R2 accounts (SS)
1/28/2026 Doc ID: e2076e746d800bcf092fd73a62c7ba714ec00056
2
TRUSTEE DECLARATIONS
Declarations
The Trustees declare that they have approved the Trustees’ report above.
Signed on behalf of the charity’s Trustees.
Andom Ghebreghiorgis 29 / 01 / 2026 Signature …………………….. Date ............................ Haben Fecadu 30 / 01 / 2026 Signature …………………….. Date ............................ Andrew Gregg Signature …………………….. Date ............................ 29 / 01 / 2026
Doc ID: 5de3f4983d09be70daa631ccd178a13c5673bfb6