Oxfam

Written by Camilla Jelbart Mosse, Oxfam's Humanitarian Campaign Manager

As G8 leaders meet on Syria, the stakes couldn’t be higher for those caught in the crossfire.

“My family lost our home and many loved ones. We’d go for days without being able to raise our heads to buy water and bread as it wasn’t safe, so we had to leave Syria. We just want to go home.”

This year, David Cameron put two issues that matter to the poorest countries on the G8 agenda; cracking down on tax dodging that blights ordinary families around the world – especially in poor countries, and stopping unfair land deals that keep people hungry.  

Written by Adam Musgrave, Oxfam's Senior Global Campaigner.

Today, I’m packing my bags and heading off to Enniskillen in Northern Ireland for the G8 Summit.

At its inception, Oxfam was critical of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa. Eric Muñoz of Oxfam America has been on a fact-finding mission to New Alliance countries and explains below that serious concerns remain.

“We don’t have water. We don’t have electricity on a regular basis. There are lots of rats and mice running around. Nothing is hygienic. It’s impossible to keep everything clean. The roof leaks... we never lived like this in Syira. We never thought we would ever have to live like this.”
Yasmin*, 33, mother of four

There's enough food in the world to feed everyone. So why does one person in every eight still go to bed hungry?

This month, eight people will meet in Northern Ireland - and they can start to answer this one question. 



Anna Macdonald, Oxfam's Head of Arms Control, gave this speech at the UK's Foreign Commonwealth Office Arms Trade Treaty Reception (15 May 2013), to celebrate ten years of Control Arms Campaigning which culminated with the UN's 2 April 2013 vote in favor of a global arms trade treaty.

Ben Murphy writes from the Global Platform, the disaster risk reduction summit and argues that urgent action is needed to transform the losing battle against risk.

While gender equality is enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and in legislation in most countries, women’s conditions of participation in markets and their rewards from that participation, still remain woefully unequal to men’s.

Many women work in temporary or informal positions and are therefore “invisible” to laws and regulations.

Several African countries are amongst today’s fastest growing economies in the world, boosted in many instances by new discoveries of oil, natural gas and strategic mineral reserves. Extreme poverty on the continent is in decline, and progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals has accelerated. A number of very poor African countries, including Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia have made recent and substantial improvements in their levels of income equality.

Last week the UN revealed for the first time that more than a quarter of a million people died in Somalia over 18 months from October 2010-April 2012. These figures are shockingly high especially when you think about the fact that most of the deaths were probably preventable if the world had just reacted sooner to the warnings that were coming out of the region as the rains started to fail in 2010.

There are promises and promises, but we get nothing, Fatima, a refugee from Syria, told one of my colleagues in Lebanon last week. Her counterparts in Jordan where I was visiting tell a very similar story. They call for more aid for those who have fled Syria of course – but also for something to be done for the millions left behind in their country’s vicious conflict.

More sweet news today for chocolate lovers: the biggest chocolate maker in the world, Mondelez International, has agreed to take steps to address inequality facing women in their cocoa supply chains - thanks to pressure from customers like you.