Catch up on our top papers and blogs of last year, as selected by Oxfam’s Policy & Practice team.
The extraordinary reaction to our Inclusive Language Guide meant that, for once, Oxfam’s annual Davos report was not our biggest paper of the year. The guide – which aims to help people working in our sector to use words that empower and liberate rather than reinforce stereotypes and oppression – got a warm welcome from many, with thousands of social media shares and more than 100,000 downloads.
But it also triggered a loud backlash from prominent parts of the UK media, prompting Oxfam GB’s CEO to respond publicly in defence of the guide: “Oxfam’s job is to end poverty – we refuse to be distracted by the toxic culture wars”.
The annual Davos report Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality still sparked a huge response with its jaw-dropping stats: did you know the richest 1% of people pocketed two-thirds of all the wealth the world created in 2021 and 2022? It also led to what we’ve chosen as our top blog of this year, by Chiara Putaturo: “The super-rich pay lower taxes than you – and here’s how they do it…”
Other papers that caught the attention of the media included our climate equality report published ahead of COP28, which ended up on the front page of the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and the paper Radical Pathways Beyond GDP: Why and how we need to pursue feminist and decolonial alternatives urgently which revealed how two thirds of women’s working hours are utterly invisible in the standard measure of economic activity, Gross Domestic Product.
Catch up on the full list of our top 10 papers and top 10 blogs of 2023 in our end-of-year newsletter, which you can read here.