The idea that increasing female empowerment is the best way to reduce poverty is not new, but in the 10 years Barbara Stocking has been chief executive of Oxfam, it has been at the heart of what the organization does.
“It’s quite deliberately said that way,” Stocking said. “It’s not that we only work with women, it’s that we look at every program and say: ‘What could this do for poor women?’”
When an estimated 70 percent of the world’s poor are women, “if you are not working on women, you’re not working on poverty frankly,” she said.
Take honey production in Ethiopia — think vast tubs shipped across the world rather than a cutesy, small-scale operation. It is no accident this program has been chosen.
“Women can keep bees near the house so they can look after their children. You start looking at everything differently if you put women at the heart of it,” Stocking said.
Looking at women’s rights, she said, covers everything from agricultural policies — because a vast number are smallholder farmers — to population concerns.
“Fundamentally, you need two things for dealing with population — one is girls’ education, which gives them power, confidence and knowledge, and then there is easy access to contraception. Most women do not want more than about three to five children — that is from surveys right across the world,” Stocking said.
She has just returned from Ethiopia, visiting camps supporting thousands of people fleeing conflict and drought in Somalia. She said the British government has been “really generous ... quite outstanding and that’s why we’re pressing other governments to do more, because — even in the midst of the recession — France, Germany and Italy could put more money in.”
Donations from the public have also been coming in, but the problem with raising the huge funds needed for food crises, as opposed to a massive event such as the earthquake in Haiti, is that it unfolds over several months. The recession, she said, has not made people less generous, but it has changed the way they give.
“People will give us money for emergencies and one-off gifts, but they won’t commit for the long term. But, in terms of the amount of money they are generally giving, that is holding up. Our shops do well during a recession but we have difficulty getting the donations,” Stocking said.
Despite this, Oxfam has had to cut 70 jobs at its headquarters, and closed some of its programs, although Stocking said they chose places where they felt they had done all they could.
A former director in the UK health service, Stocking grew up in Rugby, England, and was the first person in her family to go to university. She took up her post at Oxfam in 2001, becoming the first woman to run the organization and one of only six women to run the UK’s top 25 charities. So, why does she think there are still so few women at her level?
“If there is not direct discrimination, I think in a lot of places men don’t think women can do things — and that’s because they don’t understand how they do them. I’ve heard things like: ‘Is she tough enough?’ I think I’m pretty tough,” Stocking said.
“It only changes when you get enough women. When I was in the health service, [Britain’s then-health minister] Virginia Bottomley put a real effort into getting the number of female chief executives up, and it got to about 30 or 35 percent. Once you get to that point, meetings become different and women’s ability to feel like they’re contributing and say what they think changes. It can feel very lonely, but if you can get to a third, things change,” she said.
When Stocking goes to places such as Afghanistan, she said, she’s seen as an “honorary man.”
“If I’m going to a village, I first meet the men’s shurah [council]. And because I am a woman, I was allowed to sit with the woman’s shurah. Frankly, sitting down with the women you find out so much about what is going on in the community. For years I have been going to [the World Economic Forum at] Davos and actually the men there are much more likely to pat me on the head,” she said.
Oxfam, and non-governmental organizations, are always walking a political tightrope. In July, the UK government withdrew aid from Malawi, accusing the country of economic mismanagement and human rights abuses; Oxfam still runs programs there. In Darfur, Oxfam refused to describe what was happening as a genocide, presumably for fear the Sudanese government would prevent its relief efforts.
Stocking acknowledges that a lot of thought goes into what they can and cannot say.
“We would be very concerned about the Malawian government, but it doesn’t stop us working with communities,” she said.
Eventually, Oxfam was expelled from Sudan in 2009 because, Stocking said, “it was known we were saying things privately about the state of Darfur. We do a lot of serious thinking about what we’re going to say, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to keep quiet. Sometimes it’s about security issues as well. Are you seen to be on somebody’s side? Which is why in Somalia, all work for all agencies is very difficult. We have work there through local partners.”
In the past couple of years, aid pessimism has gained traction and publicity, partly thanks to books including Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid. Does Stocking think there is a real danger with this movement?
“I do. Nobody wants people to have to want aid. What you want is enterprise and economic development to take off, so you can tax the population, but to do that the country has to have money to put into health and education,” she said.
“Aid is certainly not the only thing, but we shouldn’t underestimate what gets done with it,” she said, adding, “and debt relief.”
Oxfam’s latest campaign, Grow, is about food prices, land grabs, climate change and investment in small-scale agriculture.
“Unless we come to some fairer agreements about those, poor people are really going to suffer. The global system is broken,” she said.
Then there is the continued campaign for a Robin Hood tax, a small levy on financial transactions to raise money for a global fight against poverty, recently backed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
“It might even happen,” said Stocking with a smile.
Does she ever get frustrated at the pace of change?
“No, because I’m very pragmatic about what Oxfam can do,” she said.
When she arrived at the camp in Dolo Abo in Ethiopia, there were 7,000 people. By the time she left five days later, there were 10,000. Women and children were arriving on the brink of death.
The UN estimates nearly 12.5 million people in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti will need humanitarian assistance as the food crisis across this great swath of east Africa worsens. Oxfam have been doing a lot of work on creating boreholes in the area.
Practical and grounded, Stocking is not the sort of person who goes in for dramatics.
She simply, but devastatingly, said: “It is going to get much worse.”
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