Unpaid carers like me save the NHS £119 billion a year, says Laura Barnes of the We Care Campaign – yet our rewards include burnout, poverty, never seeing friends and being pushed out of jobs. In the second blog in our series for Carers Week in the UK, she says it’s time to value what the millions of carers do: and that starts with tailored services, financial support, flexible work and access to respite.
Water security is not just an engineering problem: it’s about power
How to finance real water justice around the globe? Jo Trevor on four insights from a thought-provoking workshop at the recent Marmalade Festival in Oxford.
This Carers Week, we need to talk about racial justice
While the needs of all unpaid carers in Scotland are often overlooked, people from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds are being especially failed. Margaret Chiwanza introduces new research that reveals how they are being pushed into poverty and struggling in silence. Addressing that, she says, demands measures co-created with communities from targeted support payments to respite breaks to health checks.
As global humanitarian funding is slashed, here are six ways to back local leadership
Where can and should governments fill the gap? How can we improve peer support? How can we scale up good practice? Amy Croome on key takeaways from a gathering last month in Nairobi of civil society leaders and Oxfam staff.
Two drops of life: for me – and millions like me – aid has been a gamechanger
Anthony Kamande still remembers the aid-funded polio vaccine he received at his Kenyan school at the age of eight. As such transformational aid is abruptly pulled across Africa, local governments cannot plug the gap, he says – much as we would like them to. Without a turnaround in aid policies, much of the continent faces a bleak future of surging health inequalities and rising poverty.
Five ways to back enterprises that drive climate and gender justice
Women are already leading innovations in clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and climate adaptation. Here’s how to support their enterprises and ensure that climate-friendly businesses also boost gender justice. By Keisha Gani, Anais Mangin, Windy Massabni, San Sar and Diana Tjoeng.
Queer liberation is African liberation – and solidarity is like sunshine: everybody deserves some
In a blog for the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, activist Dumiso Gatsha considers what this year’s theme of “the power of communities” means when it comes to supporting grassroots organisations working towards liberation for LGBTQIA+ communities, in a world that is increasingly hostile to their rights.
No logframe, no indicators and no workplan: what can we learn from a malnutrition project that is truly community-led?
What happens when you support communities unconditionally to act as they see fit to tackle malnutrition? You get initiatives that seem, on the face of it, a long way from typical malnutrition interventions, whether that’s making soap, refurbishing a health centre or starting a poultry farm. Stephanie Buell of Action Contre la Faim on the “Boolo Xeex Xibon” project in Senegal – and how it actually put the community at the centre of the fight against malnutrition.
Cities besieged, bakeries bombed, fields set alight: it’s time to end the use of starvation as a weapon of war
The blockade of food, water and relief that has brought so much hunger and suffering to Gaza is the latest example of the growing use of starvation as a weapon of war, say Lawrence Robinson and Desiree Ketabchi. That’s why Oxfam has become a founding member of the Coalition Against Conflict and Hunger – a group of civil society organizations set up last year to end the deliberate use of starvation tactics in conflict and promote the protection of civilians and humanitarian space.
Peru banned child marriage: here are three ways longitudinal research helped to make that happen
What does it take to persuade policy makers to make real progressive change? Kath Ford explains how Oxford University’s Young Lives study found success with a combination of robust longitudinal data, translating research into policy influencing and, crucially, relationships built painstakingly over many years.