Oxfam GB Livelihoods Strategy

Our strategy on livelihoods has to be situated within our overall strategy for overcoming poverty. Thus our foundation is that all human beings have a set of rights (which are fundamental and universal); poverty is caused by power imbalances; and poverty is multidimensional including income and asset poverty; lack of access to health, education and other public goods; greater vulnerability to natural disasters and conflict; lack of a say in political and social forums; and social exclusion on the basis of gender or identity. The aim is to build on our comparative advantage of unrivalled access to both people living in poverty and to some of the most powerful decision-makers in the world, and seek to change the ideas, beliefs, policies and practices causing poverty and suffering. Efforts should be channeled toward ensuring that programmes bring about real changes in people’s lives at the local level and can be leveraged to bring about wider changes in policies and practices. We believe all human beings have economic rights as part of their fundamental human rights. Power imbalances in markets are fundamental causes of poverty and reversing such power imbalances has the potential to lift millions out of poverty. This can happen both by people organising to gain more power in markets and by governments and other organisations redistributing resources and regulating/managing markets to rebalance power. It is crucial that economies are managed to achieve growth with equity, with special attention to women’s economic rights. There is increasing evidence that policies that promote equity not only lead to rapid progress on poverty reduction, but also are good for growth in the short and longer term. Furthermore such policies can convert that growth into further poverty reduction. We have the expertise and authority to influence others who can help us to achieve this vision. We have developed programmes that assist people in gaining power in markets, and have launched our global Trade Campaign.livelihoods programme has made a real impact on large numbers of people’s lives, for example helping people gain access to land, to microfinance, and to fishing rights and as a result to greater food security. We have also helped a significant number of people to increase their income through improved skills, productivity, product quality and access to new markets. Many of our interventions are only helping people maintain the status quo rather than move forward. Furthermore these people’s livelihoods remain very vulnerable to external shocks or changes.

We have based our aim to assisst people to build truly sustainable livelihoods. There exists potential area to focus on developing programmes that can influence national policy change and link to international issues. This means we should leverage as much change or impact for as many people as we potentially could. It is advisable not to scatter or disperse our efforts instead ensuring that they build on each other and contribute to well-defined goals at a number of levels (local, national etc.). Closely aligned to this, there is a need on more learning about what works and what doesn’t work in a way that helps us to replicate successful efforts. We have built common framework in which to share lessons and have tried to associate with the key people and processes to ensure learning happens. NGO staff should be informed and made clear about the wider vision and purpose that underlies and unites both our local programme work and campaigns. There should be well-communicated definition of what we are trying to change in the global economic system and clear the confusion amongst aid workers about our stance on both markets and growth which might at times be contradictory. This should not hamper strategic clarity. We have set ourselves to analyse the local situation and wider policy/economic environment holistically, and try to succeed to assess the impact of gender differentials and HIV/AIDS which might be difficult due to lack of access to local statistics. While huge strides have been made over the last few years at integrating our humanitarian and development work, major opportunities exist to further improve integration around livelihoods work. To move now to our chosen strategic themes in more detail, we test each of them against the following critera:
Global impact and importance
Our ability to make change happen
Agriculture plays four fundamental roles in poverty eradication:
As a key contributor to economic growth and the strongest source of pro-poor growth:
Studies have shown that a 1% increase in agricultural productivity has a much stronger effect on poverty reduction in the poorest parts of the world than an equivalent gain in manufacturing or services. Furthermore, there is evidence that a well-functioning agriculture sector is a pre-requisite for growth in other sectors.
Agriculture accounts for 37% of African GNP and 27% of GNP in South Asia, and 50% of African exports.
As a key part of livelihoods strategies for hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest:
75% of the world’s poorest live in rural areas.
In Africa, 2/3 of the labour force is employed/self-employed in agriculture, and in South Asia 60%.
As a provider of locally available staple foods.
Through sustainable management of natural resources.
Studies also show that agriculture plays a key role as a “motor” of growth in rural areas, by leading to growth in off-farm employment and supporting food security of non-producers as well as farmers. Our focus will be primarily on small-scale farmers, as we believe this can contribute to wider poverty reduction including benefits to the landless. We will work directly with the landless where we believe that this is a leverage point for wider change or a major opening for successful impact.Link the micro to the macro to help ensure national/international policy change
Help people to organise to get more power in markets. When people organise effectively they are able to buy more efficiently; gain greater access to assets including finance and land; get better prices for their products; and integrate forward into activities such as storage, marketing, processing and transportation. These are the advantages that enable small-scale farmers to compete with larger organisations, as described in the BRAC example below:
we will clarify what we mean by ‘sustainable’ interventions in terms of our livelihoods programme, as different staff members understand this in different ways. The definition will include aspects of sustainability like building social capital, finances, influencing the policy environment, and diminishing other risks and vulnerabilities as much as possible.
With increasing capital mobility and demands for rapid delivery of products, labour standards are continuing to decrease despite years of campaigning to the contrary.
The inequity of the global system is very well-illustrated by workers in export industries, which are critical to national economies (e.g. ready-made garments are 5% of GDP and 76% of exports in Bangladesh) but where workers receive a pittance. Working in this theme will allow us to question the prevailing wisdom of foreign investment as a means of employment creation and poverty reduction. A programme with women workers in global trading chains gives us a key leverage point for impact on global labour legislation and practice:

The ‘worst off’ workers – precarious or temporary workers – tend to be women, who can not migrate to better jobs given their caring responsibilities.
Global trading chains are also the ‘worst’ in eroding labour rights, as legislation is allowing employers to set up a class of workers who receive no social protection. This is a dangerous precedent.
Finally, this theme provides a focal point for work on gendered economic analysis, which increases our impact across other sectors and themes.