It is ever more clear that employment is not an automatic route out of poverty in the UK. In this blog, Amy Hill outlines the difference between the national living wage and the real living wage and explains how Oxfam GB is committed to ‘decent’ work for a decent standard of living. igher minimum rates of pay were recently announced …
The impatient optimist: Urine-tricity to light humanitarian camps
In this blog we’re introduced to two sides of the ‘Urine-tricity’ story. Firstly, we hear from Oxfam’s Head of Water and Sanitation Andy Bastable, who shares his eager observations on the project, which produces electrical power from urine. To conclude, Ioannis Ieropoulos, Professor of Bioenergy and Self-sustainable Systems at University of the West of England, maps out the history of the research …
Evaluation for strategic learning and adaptive management in practice
Kimberly Bowman summarises some of the discussion and insight from a session on evaluation for adaptive management at the recent European Evaluation Society conference. ‘Adaptive programming’ (a.k.a. adaptive management, adaptive aid) is a hot topic, explored in a number of insightful reports, blog posts, learning initiatives and even manifestos. Many of us sitting in internal monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) …
Understanding the position of women in the UK labour market
Graham Whitham, Senior Policy Advisor on UK Poverty and Inequality, introduces to some of the key findings of the recent report, Women, work and wages and the UK. he labour market position of women in the UK has been generally improving, with higher employment rates and increases in earnings. However, on these measures, women still fare worse in the job …
Showing that we care: Challenging assumptions on unpaid care
Nikki van der Gaag, Director of Gender Justice and Women’s Rights at Oxfam, introduces us to the issue of unpaid care work and the impact that this has on women’s lives and women’s economic empowerment. here isn’t a woman in the world who doesn’t struggle to balance unpaid care and household work with her other responsibilities, including paid work. Which …
From coffee to conference
In this blog, Shekhar Anand and Emilia Torrisi share Oxfam’s learning on building influencing networks, how we are achieving it and why it is crucial to creating sustainable change. t Oxfam we know how crucial is to work with and influence others to enable changes in the life of poor and vulnerable communities. By bringing people together to find common solutions …
From the ground up: How Yemen’s women and girls survive
This blog introduces a study carried out by Oxfam, CARE and GenCap, to better understand how women, men, girls and boys survive in Yemen, a country torn apart by conflict. s Dubai and Saudi Arabia vie with each other to build the world’s tallest tower at an estimated cost of over $1 billion, Yemeni women and girls struggle to survive amidst …
Outed “locker room talk” is strengthening global movement to stop violence against women
Oxfam GB’s Director of Women’s Rights and Gender Justice Nikki van de Gaag, explores how the events surrounding the US Presidential campaign can help end violence against women around the world. Recent events have seen many people loudly expressing concern that after so many years of hard work on women’s rights, and rafts of legislation on gender-based violence, it is still …
Measuring indirect beneficiaries: Attempting to square the circle?
Marta Arranz introduces the challenging topic of measuring indirect beneficiaries as part of Oxfam’s efforts to better measure influencing work. s someone who works on M&E of influencing, I am interested in how programmes and campaigns can estimate who and how many people they actually benefit, particularly those who benefit indirectly, without being directly engaged with project activities. Don’t miss …
The politics of inequality; who is measuring what and why?
Our latest real geek instalment explores different measurements of inequality and how our understanding of the data they produce is crucial to the issue as a whole. here is no one ‘right’ way to measure anything. That’s what measurement is; one way to quantify out of many. There can of course be a wrong way and plenty of statisticians work …