Oxfam

Oxfam is a global alliance of 17 organizations working in about 94 countries worldwide to find resolutions to poverty and what it believes injustice around the world. In all Oxfam's actions, the final goal is to facilitate people to implement their rights and run their own lives. Oxfam works openly with communities and seeks to persuade the powerful, to make sure that poor people can advance their lives and livelihoods and have a say in decisions that affect them. Each association works together globally to achieve a better impact through communal efforts.Oxfam was initially established in 1942, at 17 Broad Street in Oxford, Oxfordshire as the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief by a cluster of Quakers, social advocates, and Oxford intellectuals; this is Oxfam at the present, still based in Oxford. It was one of numerous local committees created in support of the National Famine Relief Committee. Their task was to influence the British government to permit food relief through the associated blockade for the starving citizens of occupied Greece. The first Oxfam out of the country was established in Canada in 1963. In 1965, the organization changed its name to its telegraph address, OXFAM.

Oxfam's mission and values

Oxfam's program deal with the structural grounds of poverty and allied injustice and work mainly through local responsible organizations, seeking to improve their effectiveness. Oxfam's affirmed goal is to help citizens directly when local facility is insufficient or unsuitable for Oxfam's purposes, and to assist in the improvement of structures which directly help people facing the realities of poverty and injustice.

Values

In November 2000, Oxfam accepted the rights-based approach as the outline for all the work of the association and its partners. Oxfam identifies the universality and indivisibility of human rights and has accepted these overarching aims to utter these rights in realistic terms:

• the right to a sustainable livelihood
• the right to basic social services
• the right to life and security
• the right to be heard
• the right to an identity

Oxfam considers that poverty and powerlessness are preventable and can be eradicated by human action and political will. The right to a sustainable livelihood, and the right and capacity to participate in societies and make positive changes to people's lives are basic human needs and rights which can be met. Oxfam considers that peace and substantial arms reduction are essential conditions for improvement and that inequalities can be extensively reduced both between rich and poor nations and within nations.

Oxfam's work

Although Oxfam's preliminary concern was the provision of food to relieve scarcity, over the years the organization has developed strategies to battle the causes of scarcity. In addition to food and medicine, Oxfam also offers tools to facilitate people to become self-supporting and opens markets of worldwide trade where crafts and produce from poorer regions of the world can be sold at a fair price to promote the producer. Oxfam's program has three major points of focus: progress work, which tries to raise communities out of poverty with long-term, sustainable solutions based on their needs; charitable work, assisting those instantly affected by conflict and natural disasters (which often leads in to longer-term development work), particularly in the field of water and sanitation; and campaigner, advocacy and popular campaigning, trying to affect policy decisions on the sources of conflict at local, national, and international levels.

Oxfam works on fair trade, trade justice, education, livelihoods, debt and aid, health, HIV/AIDS, conflict (campaigning for an international arms trade treaty), gender equality and natural disasters, climate change, democracy and human rights. Through program like "Saving for Change", Oxfam is working to assist communities become more independent financially. The Saving for Change project is a program whereby communities are trained how to form communal, informal credit groups. Through these commonly beneficial groups, members who tend to be mostly women, collect their savings into a fund which is used to give loans for activities such as paying for health care and paying school fees, in addition to using the loans to fund small-scale business undertakings. Eventually, the goal of the program is to leave the community with a successful organization where people who otherwise would not be eligible for formal bank loans can go for financial support. In doing so, borrowers can start businesses which promote not only themselves but also their communities.

Moreover, Oxfam has granted relief services during diverse global crises, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, North Korean famine, 2011 East Africa drought, 2012 Sahel drought and Nepal earthquake. The Bosfam NGO was also established in May 1995 by women participating in an Oxfam GB psycho-social 'radionice' project to help internally relocated women during the Bosnian war. Oxfam has become a internationally recognized leader in providing water sanitation to impecunious and war torn areas all over the world. In 2012, Oxfam became one of the charitable groups that include the UK's Rapid Response Facility to guarantee clean water in the wake of humanitarian disasters. More recently, in January 2015, Oxfam reported that the wealthiest 1 percent will own more than half of the global wealth by 2016.