2020 brought many surprises. At the beginning of the pandemic, the last thing I expected was to be coaching voice actors down a crackly line to a recording studio in Afghanistan. My organisation, Integrity Action, was producing an animated video to showcase one of the impact stories from our work – this was part of our shift, over recent years, …
Transformative leadership is not just a buzzword
Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged as a terrifying reality worldwide, women have organised together across environmental, anti-racist, labour and political movements to provide immediate local care and support to those affected. They have reimagined the deep, fundamental changes we need for a shared future that is more just, safe and kind. These include formal strategy propositions like the Hawaii State …
What did Oxfam learn from talking to workers in food and footwear factories supplying M&S?
In 2017 M&S asked Oxfam to carry out a ‘gap analysis’ study to ‘better understand the true worker experience and identify the changes we need to make in our own operations and those of our suppliers’ similar to another undertaken by Oxfam together with Unilever. For Oxfam, the project provided a rare opportunity to hear people’s experience of working in food and footwear factories which supply M&S and other retailers. M&S and Oxfam set …
How can we create Feminist Futures?
This episode hosts a conversation recorded last September 2020 during a virtual encounter around Creating Feminist Futures. María Faciolince, our host and moderator, is joined by three visionary feminists from around the world: Crystal Simeoni (Director at Nawi: Afrifem Macroeconomics Collective), Meera Ghani (Policy coordinator at Ecolise, Co-founder of Moxie Consultancy Collective) and Maria José Moreno (Global Gender Justice Director at Oxfam International). One of the …
Girls Not Brides – weaving the ‘evidence quilt’ for gender transformative law reform
Positive prospects amid the pandemic Girls have been given much reason to hope in the Philippines. This November, a historic first, the Senate unanimously approved the Girls Not Brides bill, which proposes to criminalize child marriage. Now the House of Representatives must take this life-saving measure across the finish line before the last step – a presidential veto or approval. There are an estimated 726,000 child brides in the Philippines, making it the 12th highest in the world for child marriage in terms of …
What are supermarkets doing to tackle human suffering in their supply chains?
Last year, Oxfam embarked on a campaign asking 16 supermarkets to take responsibility for ending human suffering in their food supply chains. A year on, Monica Romis asks, what has changed? Slow progress to respect human rights The 2019 Supermarket Scorecard shows that, while some are doing better than others, all supermarkets lack sufficient policies to properly protect the people who produce our food. No supermarket does even 40% of what the Oxfam benchmark asks them to. Eight of the 16 companies, including Lidl, Plus and Whole …
Law as a tool to empower and achieve change
Noélie Coudurier, Sreetama Gupta Bhaya and Laura Gyte share a wealth of examples demonstrating how law can help drive positive change. As campaigners, we can feel ambivalent about law. As a product of society, it’s often structured to protect the privileged. Even the most progressive constitutions in the world, forged in times of political transformation and hope, are not yet …
Are supermarket canned tomatoes now free from labour exploitation?
Tim Gore shares three key findings from Oxfam’s human rights impact assessment of the Italian processed tomato sector. There have been a range of media and NGO reports in recent years about endemic labour exploitation in the Italian tomato sector. But as Oxfam’s The People Behind the Prices, shows, while some progress has been made, many of the root causes …