Oxfam

Around the world every night, one in seven people go to bed hungry – that's almost one billion people. People are hungry not because there isn't enough food produced but because our food system is broken. In fact, 80% of the world's hungry are directly involved in food production.

Despite progressive legislation on women’s rights the reality in rural communities in India is far different. Jim Clarken, Executive Director of Oxfam Ireland, visited Hyderabad and met some inspirational women from Oxfam partners combating the exploitation and abuse of women.

In the village of Bangadi, in Congo's north-eastern Orientale province, you don't have to look hard to see the impact that the vicious rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army, the LRA, has had on the community.

The village, close to the border with Sudan, where the LRA is also active, is surrounded by forest and hard to protect. 

Rima Chemirik, Advocacy Officer for the Treaty on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) of Oxfam France, has recently been in Lebanon to attend the launch of the regional campaign for the ATT.

It is always a pleasure to come back to Lebanon, the Land of Cedars. Not just for lemonade with mint or the delicious mezze, but also for the joy of living that remains here, despite the painful past that has resulted in so many dead, wounded, displaced persons and other victims.*

Hunger affects about 1 billion people around the world, and as the economic crisis continues, the push for growth can actually make matters worse.

After two successful summer school sessions in 2010 and 2011, Oxfam Novib once again organizes a summer school on Women, Peace and Security in The Hague, the Netherlands this year. 

The last year’s Arab Spring events have demonstrated the immense power that grassroots organizing, social media, and collective power can have in creating change. We’ve seen revolutions and protests, campaigns and online actions, resonating with greater impact than ever before. Women, and women’s rights organizations, have remained an essential part of the momentum of these movements and activities.

One hundred days from now, the 193 member states of the United Nations will gather in New York for a month-long negotiating conference to agree the first ever international treaty to regulate the arms trade.

Eastern Congo is supposed to be at peace. But life for civilians in Mweso health zone, Masisi territory, North Kivu, is anything but peaceful.

In spite of the old adage “don’t count your chickens,” these days we take chickens for granted. Walk into any supermarket in European and North American cities and increasingly across the developing world and you will find them in serried ranks in their plastic packaging. A generation or two ago, chickens were a luxury item; nowadays, a chicken costs less than an hours’ minimum wage of a UK worker ($9.52).

When I was studying at a university in Bangladesh back in the 1980s, the university had enforced a ‘sunset rule’ for women students. Which in practice meant that the gates of the women’s residence hall would close at sunset, after which no students were allowed to enter or leave the grounds of the residence hall. A perfect rule to keep female students invisible from public places, events and even from libraries. The rule was introduced to ‘protect’ women and keep them ‘safe.’

“Sometimes we simply don’t realize the dreadful impacts of our actions in other parts of the world,” says Maria Heubuch, a dairy farmer from Germany. Farmers all across the globe are connected by markets and production chains. And yet many of them face similar challenges: to prevail against industrialized farming.

When it comes to the role of women in society, the East African country of Somalia receives a great deal of negative attention. Given that the country has suffered from years of conflict, and is currently enduring a food crisis, it certainly is a difficult, sometimes dangerous environment where women can be left vulnerable.