Oxfam America Blog

Photo: David Stubbs / Oxfam America

Sometimes it’s the small details that can make a photo compelling. In the above image from Peru, the visual beauty of the blue sky constrasts starkly with the reality of the subject matter: the barbed wire, chain-link fence, and plateaus of digging around a mineral mine in Cerro de Pasco, Peru.

Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Members of a village savings group in Mali. Rebecca Blackwell’s photo beautifully captures the graphic details of the vivid fabrics that the women are wearing, as well as this gesture of welcome and respect that the women use to begin their meetings.

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Violeta Sithole, with her son on her back, prepares her field to plant beans. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

When the lights went out at 9pm last Wednesday with a loud click, I was just finishing up in the shower and was a little late getting out in time to find my flashlight. I was in a comfortable concrete house in the village of Inhassune, Mozambique, recently vacated by the South African manager of a 250-acre jatropha plantation run by ESV Group. Since he and the rest of the officials had cleared out, there was no electricity unless you can buy the fuel to run the generator, which costs about $10 an hour. I paid for three hours a night, from six to nine.

Jatropha trees produce seeds you can press to make biodiesel: it is one of the new biofuels we are hearing so much about as an alternative to oil. Oxfam is looking at how growing biofuel crops affects poor agricultural communities, and I interviewed a few farmers to see what they have to say about it all.

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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 »