Guest post from Oxfam’s Anthony Kamande Over the past decade, many leading economists and global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have taken a keen interest in economic inequality. Tons of inequality data have been unearthed, and inequality is now on ordinary people’s lips. Indeed, in 2015 the UN adopted

Oxfam got some headlines last week with ‘World’s 722 biggest companies ‘making $1tn in windfall profits’’. This is a good example of a ‘killer fact’ – a memorable statistic that summarizes an injustice, in this case a massive windfall for big corporates at a time of global austerity and spiralling food and fuel prices. Here’s my 2019 guide to writing

This post first appeared on Oxfam’s Views and Voices site. Neal Igan Roxas looks back on his childhood, and at the daily challenge for LGBTQIA+ people of “braving spaces” in the face of hostility, to explain why it is so vital the landmark SOGIE equality bill passes into law, after a two-decade battle for anti-discrimination protection. A same-sex couple at

Spent a mind-bending day this week discussing AI and development with some NGO and legal folk (Chatham House Rule, so that’s all I can say, sorry). Everyone in the room knew at least ten times more than me on the subject. Perfect. Some impressions/ideas. The catalyst for the discussion was the UK Government’s new White Paper on AI and Innovation,

I do love a ‘big book’ – one with a grand sweep, which tries to make sense of disparate events and processes, and leaves you feeling a little wiser. Think Francis Fukuyama (on the rise of the state), Ha-Joon Chang (on economics of development) or Yuen Yuen Ang (on China). I came away from Moises Naim’s latest book, The Revenge

Particularly liked the series of rather splendid blogs for International Women’s Day, written by our amazing LSE students. Here’s my favourite, not least because of the lovely blogging style: Does digitalised social protection worsen exclusion for women? by Divija Samria Here’s the deal: digitisation of delivery mechanisms in public programs is increasingly being used to improve targeted approaches, reduce out-of-system

Themrise Khan, Kanakulya Dickson and Maika Sondarjee introducing their new book Since the racial uprising following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the world has been faced with the reality of racism in most of what is known as the progressive, Western world. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall have brought to the forefront the ingrained

Guest post by Lauren Anderson, who was one of my Activism students last year Recently, the right wing press has been coming for the volunteers working to support refugees in Northern France, and I am writing here as one of them. The right wing response has been to vilify the efforts of volunteer organisations, claiming they are engaging in “assisting”

Ever since Matt Griffiths and I came up with the ‘cowfact’ in the early 2000s, I’ve been struck by the power of ‘killer facts’ in NGO communications (heck, even Fidel Castro used Oxfam ones). But things have moved on, and now we live in a more visual, tweetable age of ‘killer graphics’. So if killer facts reveal an injustice through

Guest post from Anthony Kamande on Oxfam’s Davos Inequality Report 2023 I’m having supper with my friend Reuben, a teacher who still hasn’t received last month’s salary (equivalent to around $167) and is struggling with the cost of living. I tell him that if the 1,890 richest Kenyans, those with wealth over Ksh600 million ($5 million), paid as little as

Max Lawson introduces Oxfam’s 2023 Davos report, ‘Survival of the Richest: How we must tax the super-rich now to fight inequality’ Walter is the father of my son’s best friend at school. He works nights as a security guard at a bank in the City of London. He has three kids. They are really struggling, as the prices of everything

Guest Post from Hugo Slim, Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford ‘Once again, humanitarians are bogged down in a moral predicament in Afghanistan. The extreme misogyny of Taliban policy is back and international humanitarian agencies should refuse to cooperate with it. The Taliban’s initial tolerance of gender equality in