Maria Al Abdeh on the work of Women Now for Development in Syria, and the impact of Jo Cox. This is the first post of a new mini series on ‘Being a feminist in difficult places’.
Why businesses are addressing unpaid care work
Sarah Hall, Oxfam’s Women’s Economic Empowerment and Care (WE-Care) Programme Manager, explores what businesses stand to gain from easing the burden of unpaid care and domestic work. A productive, healthy workforce is the backbone of any successful business. A ground-breaking new report from Oxfam and Unilever shows how businesses are identifying and addressing the challenges that limit workers’ full participation. A hidden, and often underestimated barrier, is the unequal responsibility for unpaid care and domestic work that frustrates the progression and productivity of women employees. For many businesses globally, the first …
Feminist leadership in action
Tamsin Smith interviews Damaris Ruiz, Yohanka Valdes, and Maritza Gallardo Lopez, from Oxfam’s Latin America & Caribbean (LAC) Regional Women’s Rights and Gender Justice group. They share five ways they are bringing feminist learning into the centre of our organization. Formed five years ago, the LAC Regional Women’s Rights and Gender Justice group comprises Oxfam staff and members of feminist …
How to build community trust to fight Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
The world’s second-biggest Ebola outbreak is still raging in DRC, with more than 1,400 cases and 900 deaths. Research has shown that distrust is one of the biggest obstacles in this Ebola fight. Oxfam’s Andrea Vera Nava outlines three ways to work with local communities to build their trust and increase the success of an Ebola response in a conflict …
Using elections to amplify people’s voices
Elections can be an important influencing opportunity for people living in poverty. Rodrigo Barahona and Isabel Crabtree-Condor share what Oxfam has learned from our work in four countries. Elections are a defining feature of democracies. They are a formal moment when the average person on the street can exercise power by voting for the public policies they want to see. Issues …
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 …
Standing up for women’s rights and local leadership in Uganda
Elizabeth Stevens describes how a small, local NGO has had an outsized impact on Uganda’s refugee response. Heart, guts, big ideas, and an investor. If you are launching a tiny women’s organization into the rough-and-tumble world of humanitarian response, you had better have all four. That’s what I concluded from my time with African Women and Youth Action for Development …
Making change happen
Oxfam GB’s Head of Publishing, Emily Gillingham, explains why and how we developed a free, online course for changemakers, and what the early results show. “I’m hoping this course will help me focus my objectives a bit more and discover what small but important steps I can take towards promoting change, changing minds and minding our community.” This comment from …
Young feminists driving change
Imogen Davies, Oxfam GB’s Global Adviser on Youth, Gender & Active Citizenship, and co-editor of the latest issue of Gender & Development, describes the political approaches young feminist movements are taking to reshape the international development landscape. There are more young people alive today than there ever have been before. Almost one person in four is aged 10-24, with 90 per …
Making international development campaigns work for girls
Rosie Walters discovers how girls can take a much more creative approach to feminist activism than campaigns would give them credit for. In the past decade, countless campaigns have emerged with the aim of empowering girls in the Global South. Many of them cite statistics about the returns of investing in girls’ education, including increased economic output, delayed maternity and …