Oxfam America Blog

Since writing about President Obama’s speech in Ghana I have continued to see many fascinating comments about it rolling around the internet. The AfricaFocus web site has organized several reactions from Africa that are critical and very revealing. If you want some perspective on how Africans perceive their own challenges, and how they are reacting to the speech, check it out. Particularly notable are comments about how the US has failed to acknowledge its role in supporting dictators, influencing political transitions, and supporting conflicts during the Cold War. Firoz Manji of Pambazuka News noted this in a clever, alternative version of Obama’s speech called “Obama in Ghana: The speech he might have made.”

Trade came up in an editorial in Public Agenda in Accra, Ghana, which pointed out that “if the developed countries would open just three percent of their markets to African countries, these countries would earn more income from exports trade than the total foreign aid doled out to them in any given year. Mr. Obama shied away from the controversial issue of US farm subsidies which is killing small scale farmers, especially cotton farmers in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.” Oxfam has been pointing this fact out for years, so it was good to see that the idea about trade and subsidies are still relevant, especially to Africans who have so much to gain from trade.

So what are your reactions to Obama’s speech? And if you could rewrite it as Manji did, what would you say?

Pounding fufu (boiled cassava, a staple food) in a small village in central Ghana. Most of the people in this area grow cocoa and make a decent living, but in other parts of the country a large percentage of the population live on less than $1 a day. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

Barack Obama made his first trip to Africa as President of the United States, and his speech last week in Accra was the talk of Africa and much of the world. When we looked at it here in the office, a colleague said to me, “It’s almost as if Obama works for Oxfam.” He worked through a number of Africa’s challenges and many of his recommendations were aligned with those Oxfam makes on the same issues.

But the speech was also interesting for another reason: It’s always hard for someone from the US to confront Africans about problems on their continent. Read the rest of this entry »

Zenaye Assefa stands in the vegetable garden behind her house in southern Ethiopia. Photo by Sarah Livingston

It was wet and gray the day last year that Zenaye Assefa showed us her cabbage patch next to her small house in the village of Tuka in southern Ethiopia. The rain had come too late for her other crops—corn and teff, a grain that’s a staple of the Ethiopian diet. Of all the things she told us about that day—her eight children, how she copes during times of drought—it was the garden she seemed most anxious for us to see. It was her patch of security. Read the rest of this entry »

Local groups of human rights activists such as this one in Matola Gare, outside Maputo, are working hard to educate people about the rights of women under the 2004 Family Law. A new domestic violence bill will add more work in the education of women about their rights in Mozambique. Photo by Brett Eloff/Oxfam America.

We are just hearing some good news this week from our program officer Michael Chimedza in Maputo that Mozambique’s parliament has passed a bill on domestic violence. This is a significant milestone for women in that it now allows police and prosecutors to act directly against perpetrators of domestic violence against women and children as a “public crime” or criminal matter. This is significant: the police no longer have to wait for a victim to file a formal complaint to take action. Read the rest of this entry »

Miriam Aschkenasy and Oxfam Ambassador Emile Hirsch attend a community meeting in Mudzi, Zimbabwe. Photo: Nabil Elderkin / Oxfam America

In April, Oxfam Ambassador Emile Hirsch traveled to Zimbabwe with Oxfam’s Miriam Aschkenasy and Lyndsay Cruz to see first-hand Oxfam’s response to the cholera crisis that has hit the region.

Below, Aschkenasy, Oxfam’s public health specialist, writes about the second day of their five-day trip.

I am always so tired at the end of the day in Mudzi, a region in the northeast part of the country where Oxfam has been working on the cholera outbreak. After a two-hour car ride from Harare we arrived at the Pumpkin Hotel–the only hotel in this region. We settled in (Emile got the suite with the waterbed, and I got the one next door) and had some lunch: Eggs and sadza, a finely ground cornmeal boiled in water.

After lunch, we headed out to look at a bore hole–a narrow well drilled deep into the ground.  Mudzi has hundreds of them. They’re the source of drinking water for many people in this rural region. This one was a half-hour-drive away on a bumpy, dry road–and when we arrived, we found hundreds of community members waiting for us.

Read the rest of this entry »

HIV/AIDS caregiver Lebogang Molefi, right, with patient Maria Mogale, in South Africa’s North West Province. Molefi works for Pholo Modi Wa Sechaba, one of thousands of community organizations helping the country’s roughly 5.5 million people living with HIV/AIDS. Photo: Brett Eloff / Oxfam America

Last month I won a free subscription to the glitzy celebrity magazine US Weekly. At first I was skeptical, but I’ll admit it’s become a guilty pleasure: After working on poverty issues all week at Oxfam, I kind of enjoy reading about fashion faux pas and learning how celebrities are “just like us!”

I never thought the two worlds would collide, but they did last week, when the magazine covered pop singer Madonna’s battle to adopt Mercy James, a 3-year-old girl from Malawi. It was bizarre to flip through those shiny pages, filled with expensive clothes and glamorous photos, and then read about a country with a reported 1.5 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

Read the rest of this entry »