A shorter commitment won't get the job done. It takes time to help people build skills and infrastructure, to get policies changed, and to ensure that governments spend their money more effectively.
Smart development demands monitoring and evaluation. Organizations should be accountable to report not only what they do, but also how they measure it. Don't believe stories that guarantee long-term impact after one or two years' investment; that's barely time to lay some groundwork.
We all crave the easy answer, the quick solution, but if eradicating poverty were simple, people living in poverty would have sorted it out long ago. They may lack resources like land, but they certainly don't lack intelligence or insight. Poverty is a global challenge—one that we can overcome together, but listening and learning from people living in poverty, and developing solutions with them, takes time and sustained effort.
This issue of OXFAMExchange includes inspiring stories, but they are just snapshots from a family album: moments in a long journey together. Each story is ultimately about perseverance and the need for long-term commitment.
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“This Valentine’s Day give a life-changing gift through Oxfam America Unwrapped,” said Stephanie Kurzina, vice president for development and communications at Oxfam America. “Favorites such as a dozen chicks or honey bees go a long way in fighting poverty and hunger around the world while giving you a unique way to show a loved one you care.”
Oxfam America’s Unwrapped catalog offers items that symbolically represent the organization’s lifesaving work, and each purchase is a contribution toward Oxfam’s many programs that help people living in poverty throughout the world.
Oxfam America is offering a selection of more than 70 gifts at a range of prices, including Valentine’s Day favorites such as goats, books for kids, or a grove of “miracle trees.” All gift contributions are general donations to support Oxfam America’s mission of fighting poverty, hunger and social injustice in over 90 countries around the world. Gifts are fully tax-deductible. For more information on how to gift better this holiday season, visit OxfamGifts.com.
Camera-ready art and Oxfam America spokespeople are available to the press.
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Known as Section 1504 or the “Cardin-Lugar” provision of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the law requires oil, gas and mining companies to disclose the payments they make to host governments for the exploration and extraction of oil and minerals. However, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and its oil company members are fighting back, threatening to sue the SEC, the regulatory agency responsible for issuing final rules, unless it withdraws its proposal and starts from scratch.
“The SEC has a strict mandate from Congress to follow the letter of the law and should not cave in to those who don’t want to,” said Ian Gary, senior policy manager of Oxfam America’s oil, gas and mining program. ”Our campaign aims to send a strong message that we’re watching, and ready to fight back if the regulatory agency issues weak final rules.”
The campaign, which includes a number of activities, will kick off on Friday in Washington, DC in front of the SEC, where activists will depict the oil and gas industry’s wooing of the regulatory agency. Representing SEC commissioners and oil company executives, the activists will act out a number of scenes, including pillow fights, champagne toasts and snuggling to convey the message that they may be getting in bed together to undermine the law.
The activists will then head to Houston, Texas on February 16th to gather in front of the Chevron Building downtown. Dressed as the three wise monkeys embodying the principle “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” the action will shine a light on the yawning gap between the transparency rhetoric of the industry and the reality of their actions, which has never been more apparent until now.
“The oil and gas industry loves to trumpet their support of international transparency initiatives and their tax contributions to the US government, but when a new law requires them to tell the public exactly how much gets paid to whom around the world, they bring out the lobbyists and lawyers,” said Gary.
To coincide with these activities, Oxfam America, Global Witness and a number of organizations are supporting a six-figure advertising campaign calling on the oil industry to stop fighting transparency. The ads will begin running February 13th online in the Washington Post, Politico, Huffington Post and The Hill and in print in the Wall Street Journal.
While the oil industry continues fighting transparency, some companies, such as Talisman Energy, Statoil, AngloGold Ashanti and Newmont Mining, are embracing it. They already disclose payments in every country of operation and in some cases they volunteer this information at a project level. Some companies have complained that local laws might prevent them from disclosing this information, but companies have been unable to show the SEC a single example proving their argument.
In fact, investors representing more than $1.2 trillion in assets under management welcomed the law and draft rules the SEC issued in December 2010. Furthermore, outside the United States, the transparency movement continues to grow rapidly with the European Commission introducing a legislative proposal in October 2011. The legislative directive requires similar disclosures by oil, gas and mining companies. The European Parliament and Commission are likely to issue a final law later this year. Oil companies are also actively lobbying in Brussels to weaken the proposed legislation.
“It’s time to blow the whistle on the industry’s transparent hypocrisy,” said Gary. “For more than 1.5 billion people living on less than two dollars a day in resource-rich countries, there’s no time left to wait.”
]]>Across West Africa a new food crisis is looming over a population that has already endured three of them since 2005. The last—in 2010—affected 10 million people.
But with early action, the hardship and loss so many have suffered through in the past seven years could be softened and that’s what Oxfam America’s humanitarian workers Isaac Massaga, Julie Savane, and Greg Matthews are taking the first steps to put in place. They are just back from Boulal, a collection of villages in the north, where they were working to identify the greatest needs and the responses that would best fill them—now, and longer-term.
“We’re in a good position now to mitigate the serious consequences of an acute food crisis and to help people not resort to selling assets and cattle to meet their basic needs,” said Matthews, speaking from the Oxfam office in Dakar, Senegal’s capital.
Selling valuables—livestock, farm tools—is one of the strategies poor families without cash employ as a last resort when faced with no other way to get food: They’ll use the money to buy it in the market. But in selling these important assets, they are also limiting their ability to make a living, and that drags them deeper into poverty. Halting that cycle is key to averting a crisis.
During the last growing season, rainfall in Louga was erratic, said Matthews, sometimes coming in great gushes and sometimes not at all. For the crops—millet, cowpeas, and peanuts—the result was dismal. The yields are off dramatically.
One farmer Matthews spoke with said he and his family had just consumed the last of the millet they had harvested in the end of October—300 kilograms worth. That was five times less than he would get in a good year. And the next planting season is still four months away.
How will people manage? Some, like the millet-grower, will pursue petty commerce, such as hunting for wood that they can sell as fuel in the market. But for many herders facing lean times, their strategy is to migrate with their livestock in the hope of finding pasture elsewhere.
In Boulal this year, that migration has started much earlier than usual, said Matthews.
“The hardest months for pastoralists are April, May, and June—right before the rains begin,” he said. “But they’re starting to experience that now, in the beginning of February, so most of their productive animals have already started to migrate.” That means families must take their kids out of school prematurely and abandon other livelihood efforts, like gardens and small shops, that could help support them.
Poor harvests are also adding to the stress herders are feeling. With fewer crops pulled in from the fields that means fewer leftovers of leaves and stalks to feed to the livestock. And as the health of their animals declines, so does the value of sheep, goats and cattle.
Coupled with all of this, said Matthews, are climbing prices in the markets. A 50-kilogram sack of rice that once could be had in a trade of one sheep now costs a herder two or three.
“Because of all this, people are starting to employ early coping strategies,” Mathews said. “They are starting to change the way they eat and manage their finances to prepare for a long, hungry season.”
But even as they take these steps, the future hangs heavily.
“People are really worried about what will happen a month from now,” Mathews said. “Most of the food reserves are already exhausted.”
Among the responses Oxfam is weighing are cash transfers—a tool that would allow hard-hit families to carry on as they would normally. With cash, they could buy the essentials they need during this critical period but not have to sell vital assets to do it, said Matthews. A second approach might be to help herders get access to fodder for their livestock, which provides both food and income for families.
But longer-term, the goal is to help communities become more resilient.
“The bottom line is working with communities to take charge of the issues and find solutions themselves,” said Matthews, pointing to a milking cooperative that had worked successfully in the area for a while. “It’s not about money. It’s about having, at the base community level, the desire to work together and the capacity to manage working collectively.”
Tell oil companies to stop fighting transparency! Don’t let oil companies keep hiding.
Every year mining and oil deals transfer billions to governments, but few people really know how much companies pay or how the money is spent. There are now more than 1.5 billion people living on less than $2 a day in poor countries that are nevertheless rich in natural resources, and they want to know: Where does the money go?
The transparency requirements in Dodd-Frank represent a new global standard that will help give citizens in countries producing oil, gas, and minerals information they can use to demand accountability from their own government. It will shine a light on billions in payments by many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, and 8 of the 10 ten largest mining companies in the world.
After Congress passed the law and President Obama signed it, the SEC then began to write a new rule to comply with the law. Congress required the SEC to finish by April 2011, but the final rules are long delayed. Oil companies such as Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and others have been pressuring commissioners at the SEC to issue a weak final rule. In January, their industry lobbyists – the American Petroleum Institute – threatened the SEC with a lawsuit unless the agency issues a new proposed rule that will allow them to keep making their secret payments.
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