Who We Are

The African Oyster Trust is a small charity founded and run by a small team of volunteers and helpers principally based in Warwickshire and the West Midlands.

All our funds are raised by individual and corporate donations and through fund-raising events – and all the money we raise goes directly to projects on the ground.

We pride ourselves on not wasting money on unnecessary administration, with the majority of administration costs and responsibilities being covered by the unpaid directors, friends and volunteers.

The director board comprises:

Lady Kira Dalton (chair): a long-standing Trust director, Kira is the driving force behind our many projects in the Gambia.
Josh Dale-Harris (deputy chair): Josh founded Gambia School Support in 2014 to assist nursery schools. AOT and GSS have been working closely together since 2018, and Josh joined AOT as a trustee in September 2021. He retired from his career with CBRE, a property fund manager, in London in 2017.
Steve Emery (treasurer): a finance manager with a major British plc by profession, Steve has had a strong family involvement with the Trust since its earliest days.
Maggie Maybury (secretary): having lived in The Gambia for more than 20 years, and been involved in nursery education, Maggie is a very welcome addition to our board of trustees.
David Bailey (website & email): a retired consulting engineer, who before retiring dealt with IT matters at work for many years. Computing still remains one of his hobbies.

Our Gambian management team comprises (left to right in photo):

Ansumana Manjang: Clinical & Health.
Sainey Dampha: Accounts & Finance.
Kemo Bah: Education & Secretary.
Fanding Manjang: General Manager.

To contact any of these individuals, please use the form on the contact us page in the first instance.

And to discover more about the founding of the African Oyster Trust, the people involved and the projects they support, you can also read Happy! Happy! Happy! the book written by Dee Bixley in 2015. Click on link below to download a copy.