Category Archives: oxfam

Oxfam and Coldplay Ask Scoopshot Users to Help End Land Grabs

Oxfam and Coldplay are asking mobile photographers to help create a crowdsourced music video using Scoopshot to call for an end to land grabs by governments, banks and other investors.

Scoopshot has a network of photographers in 170 countries who have been asked to show displacement in their lives by moving a personal object or task done in their home to somewhere unfamiliar. Coldplay’s music video director, Mat Whitecross, will curate and stitch together the film and photography submitted via Scoopshot’s apps and Oxfam’s website to play alongside Coldplay’s ‘In My Place’.

The film will be launched in April as the World Bank convenes its annual Spring meetings. Campaigners say that the World Bank is in a unique position to change the situation as an investor in land and an adviser to companies on buying and selling land. This is the first time that Scoopshot’s crowdsourcing service has been used for this kind of campaign.

Oxfam’s Campaigns Director, Ben Philips said: “Campaigning is all about putting yourself in someone else’s place we know that when we unite and stand up against global injustice we can make a real difference”

Written for Mobile Marketing Magazine and published here: http://www.mobilemarketingmagazine.com/content/oxfam-and-coldplay-ask-scoopshot-users-help-end-land-grabs

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First published on the Oxfam blog here.

It is the year 2060, I am 72, and I hate to say I told you so.

London is underwater, like Bangkok, Cairo and Shanghai. Venice too, but that was a given, and whole countries, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

World population is said to have peaked, at 9 billion, coinciding with the 4C temperature increase that has drowned whole swathes of continents and scorched others.

Just as in the century preceding it, 2060 has produced winners and losers.

People are starving.

2010

In 2010, I attended the Independent Live climate change debate ahead of the United Nations meeting in Cancun.

Sponsored by Shell and Channel 4, the fate of any progress on international legislation was unhelpfully sealed by our Chair in his opening riposte.

“It is accepted that no agreements will be made in Cancun,” Mike McCarthy, Independent environment editor said.

Political will

I spoke to him afterwards, and he said a point reiterated in the inewspaper, launched only a month earlier: “The Chinese made it crystal clear at Copenhagen that they were absolutely unwilling to be legally bound with regard to emissions.”

He added: “As for the US, Mr Obama’s pledge to cut emissions by 17 per cent last year was predicated on the US Congress agreeing.

“Since the triumph of the Republicans in the mid-term elections, that agreement and the legislation that would result are dead in the water.”

I pressed him, asking if the matter was so urgent, life and death, couldn’t we, the UK, the West make the first move, leave the Chinese behind for now if we had to?

No?

During the debate, they spoke of the technology being ready, but for the political will.

Public will

An impassioned member of the audience stood and said: “the public will is there, we are ready, we need your direction.”

And so we left it, all in agreement, but without dynamic leaders, with little conviction.

MARGJIN, a coalition of charities staged the picture of David Cameron and Barack Obama with the world in their hands in Liverpool.

If only these men had convinced others of the urgency.

Written will

For a fantastic comment on how the left of the media feels about Cancun, check out Johann Hari of the Independent, buried inside the newspaper like much of the coverage of the most destructive issue facing our generation.

Is it irresponsible to leave the decisions down to government, to passively report, when so many lives are at risk?

Young people in Canada are frightened.

Liverpool Oxfam society is hosting an event called ‘1.4 Billion Reasons’ on Monday from 7-9pm in the University Lecture Rooms Building about all the people already living in extreme poverty.

Behind every world leader is a mum. Mums matter.

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First published for Oxfam at http://tinyurl.com/2vosq4b

Hasina Begum, 35, stands in the river which took her home, Char Atra, Bangladesh.
Not enough money to feed your children. Fear, uncertainty, loneliness. 
“It is women who suffer”, she said.
This is not an advert for a development charity, but Gail Cartmail of Unite union talking about how government cuts here will affect people.
Disproportionately the poor, in particular women, mothers.
Despite us all owing our lives to them, world leaders are forgetting mothers, daughters, girls, still, across the globe.
A thousand women die from pregnancy complications each day, for every woman who dies, 30 more suffer chronic illness or disability.
Preventable deaths
Ten years ago our leaders pledged to eliminate extreme poverty by 2015, with eight Millennium Development Goals.
At the MDG summit in New York next week, it is the fifth and worst performing goal, to improve maternal health, that international charities are pushing.
Although more than 90 per cent of maternal deaths are preventable, pregnancy remains a leading killer in developing countries.
Nick Clegg, who will be attending the conference, has now committed the government to focussing on MDG 5.
Women in Nepal are campaigning against domestic violence
In Afghanistan- the world’s worst place to give birth– one woman dies every half an hour due to pregnancy related complications. 
Clegg told the Guardian action would double the number of women and newborns saved (at least 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth, 250,000 babies) and allow 10 million couples to access family planning.
This is in addition to June’s G8 summit commitment to spend £750m on tackling maternal mortality and an overhaul of aid programmes.
Gendercide
 A book by Nicholas Kristof, columnist for the New York Times and his wife WuDunn called Half the Sky details some of the other horrors still facing women in the 21st century.
With 60 to 100 million women missing, honour killings, acid attacks and sex slavery they call the current situation “gendercide”. Millennnium Development Goal 3, to promote gender equality and empower women, must not be overlooked.
According to Equality Now, in Somalia, 98 per cent of girls have their genitals mutilated.
Less shocking, but equally damaging, says Kristof, is the exclusion of women from healthcare and education.
Unlawful?
Despite harrowing stories internationally, mothers continue to suffer.
The Fawcett Society has requested a judicial review into the emergency budget in June; they say 72 per cent of cuts will be met from women’s incomes.
“Many of the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on, and the changes to the tax system will benefit far more men,” they said.
Ahead of the spending review in October, newspapers are also reporting that women will lose.
More women work in the civil service, and some departments will be cut by 40 per cent.
According to a report released by the Chartered Management Institute, the gender pay gap in the UK will not close until 2067.
Nearly the same amount of time since the Equal Pay Act first legislated against sex discrimination in the workplace.
The CMI is calling for transparency, Mike Petrook said: “People should not be discriminated against because of one letter on a birth certificate, it’s the job that earns the money, not the individuals.
“If companies don’t do this, they will lose their best talent as they are not reflecting the market place.”
Dangerous and unpaid
 Unpaid work done by women is thought to contribute billions to the UK economy every year.
In Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, unofficial care work accounts for more than 80 per cent of all women’s jobs.
Almost two thirds of women in the developing world work in dangerous, low-paid or temporary jobs.
Centenary of National Women’s Day
Next year on March 8th we will celebrate 100 years of National Women’s Day. But how far have we come?
Two out of  every three countries now have the same number of boys as girls in school, and women now occupy almost 40 per cent of paid jobs outside of farming, compared to 35 in 1990.
Sri Lanka, Thailand and Honduras all took fewer than 10 years to dramatically improve women’s chances of surviving pregnancy. Thanks to some progress on this MDG the percentage of global deliveries attended by a midwife or doctor has risen from 9 per cent to 19.
We ought to celebrate reducing the number of women dying during childbirth from 1,400 to 1,000 a day. But that is still a third of a million every year to save.
Mums matter
There are now more people called David than there are women in the British cabinet. Women across the globe are still unequal and unheard.
Join:
Oxfam and the Women’s Institute now work together on maternal mortality, and they need your support.
Read:
Half the Sky is from a Chinese proverb, where women are said to be so important as to hold up half the sky
Be positive:
Suffragettes hadn’t known anything other than political inferiority, but they didn’t give up. According to the CMI, women in the UK are resigning in record numbers from positions where they aren’t treated the same as their male colleagues.
If we accept that the most well off countries must help those who are less fortunate, it is up to us, as women in relative comfort, to find the strength to help our sisters who are in greater need.

Haiti- six months on, what can we really expect?

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First published for Oxfam at http://tinyurl.com/353xb8w

Americanisation is often seen as damaging to other nations’ cultures.

But the US’s influence on what the world considers important can only have helped Haiti after the earthquake six months ago.

Hundreds of Haitians have escaped poverty for fame in the United States, as sports stars, models and musicians.

And with the island’s close proximity to the superpower and the sheer force of the disaster, fundraising happened on a massive scale.

But half a year on the BBC has begun asking whether stalled progress, shown by news outlets here, will deter such a concerted response in the future.

Why so little progress?

Before the earthquake, Haiti was one of the poorest countries in the world.

Nearly half the population did not have access to clean drinking water, 86 percent of people in urban areas lived in slums and 83 percent of people had inadequate access to toilets.

Less than half of the 2.8 million people living in the capital Port-au-Prince had access to electricity.

Social services were similarly poor, with many children not attending school, 38 percent of the population over the age of 15 illiterate and unemployment at 30 percent.

No amount of aid, especially in a crisis, can change the structure of a country overnight.

Disaster

The death toll of 222,570 means there are hundreds of thousands of people still experiencing grief, hardly great circumstances to face rebuilding their lives.

Another 300,000 were injured, and presumably family members are now caring for them, another, often invisible drain on human energies.

One and a half million people are living in temporary housing- tents, corrugated iron and tarpaulin- amongst the 19 million cubic meters of rubble from the collapse or damage of 188,383 houses, 3,978 schools and 30 hospitals.

A quarter of the civil service were killed in the disaster and government buildings were destroyed- the very people and resources necessary to co-ordinate the clean up.

So will it deter response?

For people to give, they must appreciate the extreme circumstances that a natural disaster presents- it could happen to any of us- and go into it with the knowledge that rebuilding large areas of a country takes time.

Adding to that the context of poor infrastructure, which increased the scale of destruction, means time for planning a useful and permanent build is equally understandable.

True picture

To make sure that people are not deterred from giving in these kinds of situations, coverage must be balanced between holding donors to account with showing what progress has been made.

Having raised $90 million, Oxfam is helping more than 440,000 people gain access to clean water, sanitation, education, shelter, and support for livelihoods.

Stories are still coming out of families surviving against the odds to become reunited.

But Jean Renald Clerisme, a presidential adviser, claims that less than 2 percent of the aid pledged has been received.

A BBC news report showed a church group digging themselves out of the rubble.

Is this community empowerment, or an example of a lack of help from the outside world?

With expensive foreign news bureaus closing, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to get a true picture of the world.

Ultimately the BBC has the pleasure of being founded in a country that doesn’t experience emergencies of this scale.

Maybe, all things considered, six months is too early to ask.

What do you think?