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 …
Investors driving better quality jobs
Rachel Wilshaw, Oxfam GB’s Ethical Trade Manager, explains why investors are key to improving working conditions in global supply chains. At the World Economic Forum in January, an exchange between Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima and the CFO of Yahoo went viral. Why? Because it highlights two contrasting views of job creation. For many business leaders, a low unemployment figure is a …
We must do more to make emergency sanitation safer
Why do so few women and girls use emergency latrines? Rachel Hastie shares key findings that could help make sanitation safer in camps. We looked at the latrine with dismay, as Sarah told us how her relatives had been killed in South Sudan. She had walked to the Ugandan border with her three children and nine nephews and nieces. Their …
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 …
A user-centred handwashing kit for emergencies
Foyeke Tolani, Public Health Promotion Adviser and Project Coordinator, describes how a collaboration with a UK school sparked the process of developing Oxfam’s innovative new handwashing kit. For over a decade, we had been exploring handwashing kit options to replace the Tippy Tap. The Tippy Tap requires lots of promotion for sustained use, and as a device it is not …
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 …
Debt: a noose around Somalia’s future
Full debt cancellation is the only way forward for Somalia, write Dustin Barter, Oxfam’s Senior Campaigns and Policy Manager in Somalia, and Mohamed A. Ahmed, Independent Debt Specialist. As the African Union Summit kicks off in Addis Adaba this week, Somalia remains swamped in debt, struggling to kick-start a more positive trajectory. Debt relief, a once hot topic (thanks Bono!), …
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 …