2 Weeks to Go | Big Give Christmas Challenge 2025 🎁

In just 2 weeks’ time, at 12:00pm on Tuesday 2nd December, the Big Give Christmas Challenge will be launched. Following our successes in 2022, 2023 and 2024, we are very excited to be participating once again, and with your help, we'll continue the success in support of our Porridge Clubs programme!

This year, we have set our biggest ever fundraising target and we are aiming to raise a humungous £16,000 in the 7 days following the launch. This will provide 175,000 mugs of porridge to hungry school children in Kenya, and will slash school absence caused by food poverty.

Each donation made on our special Big Give Christmas Challenge page during that week will be DOUBLED £-for-£ thanks to our match funding pot, consisting of a generous pledger and our wonderful Champions, the Coles-Medlock Foundation, until our £16,000 target is reached.

One act, double the impact.

We’ll share another post on 2nd December to let you know exactly how you can donate to the campaign (please hold off donating before then!) but based on our experience in the past couple of years, we thought it might be useful to share some answers to Frequently Asked Questions below so you can prepare accordingly.

In the meantime, we would love you to bookmark our special Big Give Christmas Challenge page and set a calendar reminder for 12:00 on 2nd December!

Our Big Give Christmas Challenge page

Frequently Asked Questions

  • African Children’s Fund is hoping our supporters will donate £8,000 during the Big Give Christmas Challenge week. We also have an £8,000 match funding pot available so if we reach our target, we will raise £16,000 to support Kenyan Porridge Clubs. That would be enough to provide a mug of nutritious porridge to approximately 1,800 primary school children for 4 months!

  • Simply click here to donate to our special Big Give Christmas Challenge page. The donation button will be live from midday on Tuesday 2nd December until 11:59 on Tuesday 9th December. Remember, until we reach our target, every £9 you donate will actually be worth £18 which is enough for 200 mugs of porridge.

  • Prior to the launch date, we received an anonymous pledge totalling £4,000 which forms the first part of our match funding pot. This has also been matched by The Coles-Medlock Foundation who have put forward a further £4,000 which is known as ‘Champion Funding’. The pledge and the Champion Funding combine to give us a match funding pot of £8,000.

    This means the first £8,000 of donations that we receive on our dedicated page during the Big Give Christmas Challenge week will be matched pound for pound.

    When you make a donation, you will be notified whether matching funds are still available. If so, the funds are reserved for 30 minutes to allow you to complete your donation. If the donation is not completed within 30 minutes, the matching funds are released back into our matching pot. If applicable, you will be notified about this.

  • You can pay by debit card, credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. The following card types are accepted: Mastercard / Visa / Maestro / Switch / Solo / Delta / American Express.

  • As Bank Transfers may take 5 days to be realised, they may fall outside the match funding period. Therefore, we do not recommend setting these up for this campaign. To contribute to the Big Give Christmas Challenge, please make your donation on our dedicated Big Give Christmas Challenge page.

  • Absolutely! You can hold a fundraising event at any time before 9th December, and put the funds aside to pay in on our dedicated Big Give Christmas Challenge page before 9th December. Think…

    🍰 Cake Sales
    🏫 School fetes
    😋 Porridge tasting
    ❓ Quiz nights

    … or let your creativity run free! By all means share your plans with us and we’ll be happy to give them a plug if you would like us to.

  • Unfortunately not for this campaign. To contribute to the Big Give Christmas Challenge, all donations must be made on our dedicated Big Give Christmas Challenge page.

  • Unfortunately not for this campaign. To contribute to the Big Give Christmas Challenge, all donations must be made on our dedicated Big Give Christmas Challenge page.

  • Absolutely! There is no donation cut-off amount so if we receive donations over and above our target, it will mean even more children will be supported to go to school. If we exceed our £8,000 donations target, additional funds won’t be matched but you will still be providing even more mugs of porridge to help children attend school regularly in Kenya, giving them better opportunities for a more prosperous future.

  • While we hope this isn’t the case, that’s OK too. If we don’t reach our target, your donations will still be matched and we will still receive them. It will simply mean that we don’t exhaust our match funding pot and unused pledges or ‘Champion Funding’ will instead be returned to the original donors.

  • Yes indeed! If you are eligible for Gift Aid, you can indicate this when making your donation. We will include your donations in a claim to HMRC after the Big Give Christmas Challenge is complete. Please note, Gift Aid is not matched from the match funding pot.

  • Every donation made on the platform is subject to a small payment processing fee of 1.5% + 20p + VAT (UK & EU) or 3.2% + 20p + VAT (Non-EU & American Express). We feel these fees are very reasonable. If you wish, you can also give an optional ‘tip’ to The Big Give, and this doesn’t affect how much money we receive. Full details of their fee structure are available here. We reclaim the Gift Aid directly so you can ignore this element of the calculation!

Tamsyn WymerChristmas, Big Give, Big Give Christmas Challenge, Kenya, Porridge Club, #penniesforporridge