Registered Voluntary Organisation · Malta · VO/0642
From our home in L-Iklin, the International Foundation For Development works alongside communities in Malta and across borders to widen access to education, build climate-resilient neighbourhoods, and stand with families when life becomes precarious. We do not arrive with finished answers. We arrive with time, resources and the discipline to measure what we promise.
18,400+
Lives directly touched since 2016
63
Communities partnered with across 11 countries
94
Education & skills projects delivered
88%
Of expenditure allocated to programme delivery
Welcome
The International Foundation For Development began with a small group of educators, social workers and Maltese and international professionals who kept meeting the same frustration: good intentions arriving too late, in the wrong shape, for too short a time. Families were offered emergency parcels but not pathways. Young people were offered certificates but not connections. Villages were offered equipment that no one had been trained to maintain.
So we constituted ourselves formally under Maltese law and set a different standard for our own work. Every initiative we run begins with listening sessions in the community concerned, is co-designed with people who will live with the results, and is committed to for a minimum of three years wherever funding allows. We would rather do four things properly than forty things visibly.
Today the Foundation operates from Triq San Mikiel in L-Iklin, coordinating volunteer teams, partner organisations and institutional funders around four operational tracks. Our work is local and international at once: the same principles that guide a literacy circle in a Maltese town guide a co-funded youth exchange with a partner in North Africa.
Our Mission
We design, fund and deliver community-led programmes that remove practical barriers to learning, livelihood and dignity — and we hold ourselves publicly accountable for whether those barriers actually fall.
Our Vision
We work towards communities that can withstand economic and environmental shocks because their people are skilled, connected, represented and supported by institutions that answer to them.
Core Programs
Our programmes are deliberately interlinked. A young person in our mentoring track may live in a household supported by our welfare team and study in a centre our sustainability volunteers renovated.
Literacy circles, digital and vocational skills labs, and long-term mentoring that walks with a young person from classroom to first payslip.
Small-scale infrastructure, water and energy efficiency, urban greening and community resilience planning designed and owned locally.
Dignified, discreet support for families in crisis, people seeking protection, and older or isolated residents in our own neighbourhoods.
Exchanges, joint research and co-funded projects that connect Maltese civil society with partners across the Mediterranean and beyond.
Why Partner With Us
Institutional funders, corporate partners and individual supporters all ask a version of the same question: can we see where this goes? Our answer is structural.
Enrolled with the Commissioner for Voluntary Organisations in Malta under VO/0642, with annual returns, statutory accounts and a documented conflict-of-interest policy.
A volunteer Board of Administration sets strategy and oversees finance; no board member receives remuneration for their governance role.
Every programme carries defined objectives and indicators. We publish what worked, what did not, and what we changed as a result.
Latest News
Thirty-one participants aged 16 to 24 completed the twelve-week programme in web fundamentals, data literacy and workplace communication. Nineteen have since entered employment, apprenticeships or further study; the remainder continue with our mentoring track.
The Foundation formalised cooperation with community organisations in Tunisia and Sicily to co-deliver youth exchange placements and share safeguarding, monitoring and evaluation practice across the three organisations.
A volunteer-supported installation now captures an estimated 41,000 litres of rainwater annually, reducing the centre's mains consumption and creating a practical teaching site for our environmental education sessions.
Volunteers give two hours a week or two months a year. Companies second staff, fund a cohort, or open apprenticeship places. NGOs co-write proposals with us. Individuals give what they can, and receive a plain account of where it went.
