Annual report

The Empress Shôken Fund
The Empress Shôken Fund was created in 1912 
by Her Majesty the Empress of Japan to promote 
“relief work in time of peace”. It is an endowment 
fund and the interest revenue drawn on the cap-
ital is used to finance the grants. The Empress 
Shôken Fund, jointly managed by the IFRC and 
the ICRC, supports projects showing innovation 
in addressing humanitarian challenges and 
strengthening National Societies. 
In 2022, the fund received 52 applications cover-
ing a diverse range of humanitarian projects run 
by National Societies in every region of the world. 
A total of 472,000 Swiss francs was granted to 16 
projects in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Croatia, 
Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, 
Jordan, Libya, Mongolia, Niger, Portugal, Serbia, 
South Korea, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Yemen. 
The work supported by the Empress Shôken 
Fund ranges from first aid and rescue, support 
for young people, disaster preparedness, health, 
social welfare, and other aspects of National 
Society development. Examples include:
•
The Red Cross Society of Côte d’Ivoire is using 
the grant to improve education and increase 
autonomy of young women in the Bounkani 
Region who have not attended school. 
•
The Dominica Red Cross Society is intro- 
ducing farming techniques and other 
solutions for managing climate change and 
other risks. 
•
The Mongolian Red Cross Society is imple- 
menting
 
digital communication tools 
funded by the grant to help ensure there is 
meaningful community participation across 
all programmes and operations, improve its 
public relations management and strengthen 
its transparency and accountability to 
communities. 
•
The Sri Lanka Red Cross Society
 
is aiming for 
better nutrition and improved water, sanita-
tion and hygiene in vulnerable communities 
that are drought-prone. The grant estab-
lishes groundwater recharging practices to 
facilitate groundwater retention.
In early October 2022, the 102nd call for appli-
cations was launched with a closing deadline of 
December 31, which enabled the fund to secure 
51 new applications to be processed in 2023.