xfam is one of the world’s most respected charity NGOs whose field workers in the developing world have contributed to famine relief and poverty alleviation since the early nineteen sixties. Yet lately it is has taken to officially “partnering” with British based organizations that preach radical Islam and probably funnel money to UK government designated terrorist organizations. No one has taken them to court and the UK parliament has taken no action against Oxfam. What is going on and why?
In its own words Oxfam is, “An international confederation of 17 organizations networked together in 92 countries as part of a global movement for change to build a future free from injustice and poverty.” Its average annual income is 1.1 billion Euros. Sixty per cent of its funding comes from private donations. The rest comes from the UN, the EU and other bilateral donors in the OECD.
The institutional history of Oxfam can be summed up in three stages. The first was an exclusively British effort in support of famine relief during and after WWII. The second focused on disaster relief and rural development in the former colonies and territories of the British Empire, as their political independence gained through the 1960s did not usher in the hoped for rise in living standards. The third stage, now the dominant stage, is to harness Oxfam’s international coalition of partners around the world to persuade both citizens and institutional donors (in the West and at the UN) to provide the financial and institutional assistance for Oxfam’s selective aid to disempowered groups based on the latest “rights based development” theory of international development.
This explains why an enormous amount of Oxfam’s third stage efforts have become overtly political, since they argue it is the misguided economic and social policies of the OECD that are the “root cause” of poverty in developing nations...
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