When the businessman Sir Ian Wood launched his charitable trust a year ago with the aim of tackling poverty in the UK and Africa, the credit crunch was in its infancy and no one predicted just how bad it would become.

In the last 12 months, Wood’s own £890m fortune, which saw him ranked second in the Sunday Times’ Scottish Rich List this year, has been hit, falling by as much as £100m according to some estimates, as the share price in his oil services company Wood Group, which he and his family own 17%, has almost halved.

But it hasn’t put him off pledging to give away as much as £100m — £50m through the Wood Family Trust and just last week another £50m to help redevelop a square in Union Terrace at the heart of his hometown Aberdeen.

His decision, announced a year ago, was to spend £50m over the next five to 10 years tackling poverty. Twelve months on things are beginning to move although his team headed by energetic chief executive Jo Mackie, took some time assessing which projects to back before committing £2.4m in the first year.

It was Wood’s increasing concern about the gap between the rich and poor that led him to establish the trust. The Wood Group is a global giant with 28,000 staff in 30 countries. Travelling the globe, Wood became more and more concerned by the poverty he witnessed especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

“I know there is terrible poverty here at home but this was on an entirely different scale,” he said. “25,000 children die needlessly every day, 1.4bn across the world have no education. How can anyone be aware that a large part of humanity lead such a miserable existence and not do something?”

Wood decided 75% of the money would go to Africa with half of the rest on overseas volunteering and the other half helping to inspire leadership in schools in the UK.

But at a time when UK charities are finding it tough, should not a greater proportion of the money be spent here at home?

“I admit Africa is frustrating and that in some places there are concerns about how money is being spent,” he said, “but, when you consider the degree of hopelessness there, if you are a human being you have to do something.

“Our projects are not about giving people fish. They are about teaching them how to catch the fish. We are not displacing any other money; our money is focused on being an additional help.”

He talks about projects like a farmers’ cooperative in Tanzania which supplies coffee to Starbucks and how by giving them access to business tools, they would become more productive.

The Trust’s UK work will focus on developing youngsters in Scotland to create a “nation of enterprising young people who have an understanding of citizenship values and tolerance for others”.

One of the projects, the Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI), is running a pilot in schools which will see children identify a social service charity to help, learning how to analyse the charity’s management budget, strategy and staffing arrangements.

The winning case in each school will earn a donation of £3,000 to go to the grass-roots charity they have been working with.

“We’re doing it here in Aberdeen with a private school, Robert Gordon’s College, and many of those pupils will have to work in parts of the city they would never see,” said Wood.

“That’s something I think is great because in years to come that will shape their views in other ways and help them see how others live.

“We make no distinction between the schools we support in terms of state or private or religion and one thing I have never understood is why in Scotland we have separate schools. Surely we can find a way to have kids of different religions taught together?

“Our project is about promoting tolerance over intolerance and that comes from understanding.”

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