
September 10, 2025
Millions of women across the globe farm and look after land – yet are excluded from owning it, hurting their incomes, depriving them of wealth and undermining their other basic rights. Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija on a wide-ranging issue of the Oxfam-edited Gender and Development journal that not only examines structural obstacles to women owning land but also looks at broader themes, including the way deprivation of land rights adds to women’s care workload – and, crucially, how securing women’s land and water rights will be essential for global food security and climate resilience.
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The world is seeing more extreme heat – so why don’t we plan for it like other humanitarian disasters?
July 29, 2025
Despite the climate crisis driving more bouts of devastating heat, too much of the world remains poorly prepared. Nuzhat Nueary introduces new Oxfam/FCDO research that looks at the links between extreme heat and water scarcity and highlights glaring gaps in humanitarian response. Why is extreme heat not seen as an urgent priority for global action in the same way as other
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Water security is not just an engineering problem: it’s about power
June 11, 2025
How to finance real water justice around the globe? Jo Trevor on four insights from a thought-provoking workshop at the recent Marmalade Festival in Oxford.
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Cities besieged, bakeries bombed, fields set alight: it’s time to end the use of starvation as a weapon of war
May 6, 2025
The blockade of food, water and relief that has brought so much hunger and suffering to Gaza is the latest example of the growing use of starvation as a weapon of war, say Lawrence Robinson and Désirée Ketabchi. That’s why Oxfam has become a founding member of the Coalition Against Conflict and Hunger – a group of civil society organizations set up last year to end the deliberate use of starvation tactics in conflict and promote the protection of civilians and humanitarian space.
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Why water security is everybody’s problem – and nobody’s problem
March 31, 2025
The growing water crisis for billions threatens global progress on everything from poverty to hunger to green growth. Yet no one is stepping up to deliver and coordinate the funding needed to avoid a catastrophic future. Jo Trevor sets out the urgent need for smart water financing – which is the focus of an Oxfam event at this week’s Marmalade Festival in Oxford.
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As global water runs dry, how can we make sure billions don’t get cut off?
January 8, 2025
Over two billion people lack access to safe drinking water – and the situation is set to become bleaker still because of climate change, say Jo Trevor and Padmini Iyer. How do we build equitable and collective approaches to global water security that uphold everyone’s basic right to clean water?
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What’s blocking progress in fixing the Global Water Crisis?
July 27, 2021
I took part in a fun podcast recently on ‘water for development’. I was in the company of some people who actually know about the subject (Michael Wilson, Rosie Wheen, Melita Grant and Rachel Mason Nunn). I was playing my favourite role in this final wrap-up conversation of a series of discussions, that of informed ignoramus burbling on about how
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5 ways to fix South Asia’s Water Crisis, by Vanita Suneja
July 17, 2018
Vanita Suneja of WaterAid reports on what is being done to prevent South Asia running out of underground water Major capital cities in South Asia – Dhaka, Delhi, Islamabad, Kabul and Kathmandu – are showing groundwater stress with the water table receding at an alarming rate. In Islamabad, the water table fell to 30 feet below the surface in 2016,
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Fighting inequality one city at a time: reclaiming public water and electricity in Delhi
February 12, 2014
There’s a political earthquake going on in Delhi right now. Biraj Swain (Exfam India, now campaigning and researching on water) looks at its immediate impact on poor people’s access to water and electricity. Last month marked the first month in office of the anti-corruption movement turned political party, the Aam Admi ‘Common Man’ Party government in Delhi, India. Two days
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States v Markets: Understanding Tajikistan’s Post-Soviet malaise through its drinking water
February 6, 2014
I don’t do much on water (as my pal Henry Northover at WaterAid never fails to remind me) but last week, I was in Tajikistan to help our team think through their water-related work. They already run the Tajikistan Water Supply and Sanitation (TajWSS) network, which combines a high level ‘convening and brokering’ approach to finding solutions to the country’s
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‘Convening and Brokering’ in practice: sorting out Tajikistan’s water problem
January 17, 2013
In the corridors of Oxfam and beyond, ‘convening and brokering’ has become a new development fuzzword. I talked about it in my recent review of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and APPP promptly got back to me and suggested a discussion on how convening and brokering is the same/different to the APPP’s proposals that aid agencies should abandon misguided attempts to
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Confronting scarcity by managing water, energy and land: the new European Report on Development
June 13, 2012
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