What Oxfam is Doing
- Helping Family Farmers
- Preventing Disasters
- Overcoming Discrimination and Exclusion
OVERCOMING DISCRIMINATION AND EXCLUSION
Oxfam supports innovative organizations that are helping family farmers, women's organizations, and indigenous people in Central America defend their rights and improve their incomes.
Five centuries after the Spanish conquest of Central America, there are still marked divisions between the indigenous, predominantly Mayan, population and the ladino people. There is a much higher concentration of poverty in Mayan communities, and widespread ethnic discrimination prevents them from meeting their basic needs for education, employment, and decent living conditions.
Indigenous people, who represent as much as 70 percent of the population of some Central American countries, have limited access to electricity, drinking water, and sewerage, and suffer from high rates of chronic malnutrition and disease. Many of these problems are shared by other low-income communities in the region.
Oxfam America has initiated a two-year program in El Salvador to foster democracy by creating a bridge between the historically closed Salvadoran government and the majority of its citizens. Today, 13 Oxfam partners, including small producer cooperatives, youth groups, and humanitarian organizations, are learning how to present their interests to local and national governments. Women are the focus of almost half the project’s $1 million budget.
The project includes efforts to change media laws and promote local radio programming and other measures that will open up the media to diverse voices, and encourage a healthy public debate of social issues.