Respecting research participants around the globe means protecting their privacy and right to consent and also ensuring their data is well used, say Eve Grennan and David Chiana – as they share newly anonymised data about the impact of Oxfam’s work, which can now be used by anyone
‘None of us expected such a jump in wealth…’ The inside story of how Oxfam’s analysts counted the billions
If the ten richest men sat on their wealth in dollar bills, they would be halfway to the moon – but how do you work that out? In another blog for Davos week, Alex Maitland tells us how the Oxfam team came up with some of our mind-blowing wealth stats
Why does Oxfam say ‘inequality kills’? We break down the numbers
In our latest blog for Davos week, Didier Jacobs unpacks the calculations behind our striking statistic that inequality is linked to one death every four seconds
Podcast: Coronavirus and Web Data Analysis
Social media has the potential to profoundly influence the way society works. Social media has been used for understanding crowd sizes from Instagram posts and to analyse hate speech and to understand presidential elections. Or more recently to improve our understanding of the lived realities of women and girls. So, how can we gather data from social media platforms and …
Podcast: How to measure resilience capacities – Experience from Oxfam’s impact evaluations
[buzzsprout episode=’2559154′ player=’true’] Oxfam defines resilience as ‘the ability of women and men to realize their rights and improve their wellbeing despite shocks, stresses and uncertainty’ (The future is a choice, Jeans et al., 2016). So… Can resilience be “measured”?! Well, we have been trying since 2012! Inspired by John Twigg’s (2009) characteristics approach, our measurement approach relies on identifying …
The good and the ‘not so good’ of our experiences with SenseMaker
When we purchased a license for the SenseMaker research method in early 2017 (a proprietary data collection and analysis software), the excitement in our more “geeky” teams was palpable. SenseMaker is a research method inspired by the Cynefin complexity framework, which is known for helping make sense of, and categorizing messy or ambiguous situations that require some sort of decision-making. …
How we’ve put into practice GDPR and conducting impact evaluations
We have been thinking a lot about the right to privacy lately, in relation to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and our role in Oxfam as impact evaluation advisers. The incorporation of this right in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights reflects a broad recognition that privacy is fundamental to dignity and freedom. We know that when individuals are …
How to integrate gender in research planning
Anam Parvez Butt and Irene Guijt from Oxfam’s research team introduce our latest research guidelines for development practitioners. High quality research is critical for evidence-informed advocacy and development programming. But research cannot be high quality if it is gender blind. For Oxfam, ‘putting women at the heart of everything we do’ is only a wish unless practical action follows. Our …
Imagining alternative futures
Programme Researcher, John Magrath, describes the process of applying ‘participatory scenario development’ to explore how Bangladesh might achieve zero hunger and zero carbon emissions by 2041. It is tempting to assume that the future will follow much the same trajectory as the past. Imagining alternative futures can be dismissed as dreaming, or science fiction. And if we do imagine the …