For International Youth Day Marième Soda Ndiaye from RENF and Oxfam’s Magalie Laliberté reflect on the process of supporting active citizenship and youth employment opportunities in West Africa. All over Africa, especially in West Africa, the proportion of youth in the population is increasing. In sub-Saharan Africa, 70% of the population are less than 30 years old. Mali (with an …
A feminist approach to monitoring and evaluation
Irene Muñoz introduces our discussion paper on how to apply feminist principles to program monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning. Some time ago Oxfam’s staff, partners and external experts came together to reflect about the relevance for women’s rights of being able to capture, measure and perceive transformational change. They came up with a declaration about the feminist principles that should …
Making ‘people are our greatest asset’ ring true
The Workforce Disclosure Initiative will shine a spotlight on how companies treat the people working in their supply chains. Rachel Wilshaw, Ethical Trade Manager, explains how and why Oxfam is involved. ‘Disclosure’ is a hot topic at present, with the BBC dealing with the fall-out from disclosing the gender pay-gap amongst top presenters, the prime minister of Pakistan resigning following …
New Delhi: a city of men?
What does it mean to be a man? Prescriptive gender norms limit the lives of both men and women. Earlier this week Neha Kagal described how women’s empowerment in wastepicker communities in India has had a transformative impact on gender relations. Here Shannon Philip looks at how men and women in New Delhi are affected by ideas of masculinity and …
A man’s path to gender equality?
What happens to the gender dynamics in a community when women become socially and economically empowered? Neha Kagal conducted research among Dalit communities in India which found pathways to gender equality are far from straight forward. The feminist trade-union of women wastepickers in India, has 8,000 members all of whom belong to the ‘lower’ Dalit caste. Established in the early …
Global innovations in measurement and evaluation
In the latest for our Real Geek series, Ruth Gripper from NPC delves into the latest innovations for measurement and evaluation. If I asked you what were the most exciting developments in measurement and evaluation today—things that are going to shape practice in the years to come—could you pick a list? Exploring innovations in measurement and evaluation Call it brave …
Disaster insurance: propaganda or the future of aid?
Could disaster insurance be the future of aid? Anna Warwick summarises the debate on the role of insurance to build resilience in disaster prone areas. From one of the sessions which took place at the Oxfam hosted Resilient Solutions symposium. Theresa May recently stated that disaster insurance programmes were the ‘future of aid.’ After seeing the panel on Weather Insurance …
Influencing for social justice: nudge, shove, show or shout?
What do, closed door talks with civil servants about climate change, street theatre about the impacts of domestic violence, and anti-tax haven marches have in common? Answer: They’re all about influencing for a fairer, safer, greener world. Sally Golding and Ruth Mayne introduce the what, how and why of ‘influencing’ in the first of a new series of blog posts. …
Decision-making for an uncertain future
Lisa Horrocks, Principal Climate Resilience Consultant at Mott MacDonald, comments on some initiatives tackling the issue around long term climate change solutions. Wherever we are in the world, economic development requires us to take decisions which either have short or very long lifetimes. Long lifetime decisions can be extremely costly and risky, especially with shifting baselines. This is the situation with …
A human economy for women and men
How can we build an economy that works for everyone? Fenella Porter explains why in order to conceptualise a truly ‘human’ economy we need to look at inequalities of gender as much as inequalities of wealth. If the world turned upside down and we replaced all the women with men, and all the men with women, we still wouldn’t have …