It was in 1942 that a group of citizens created the Oxford Committee for the Fight against Famine, whose immediate aim was to come to the aid of the women and children of Greece, a country occupied by Nazi Germany and suffering from full force of the naval blockade of the allied forces. A few years later, in a United Kingdom undergoing reconstruction, the first Oxfam store opened in Oxford. The idea is simple and effective: collected and managed by volunteers, clothing and book donations from individuals are resold there at a moderate price, and the profits thus generated are redistributed to fight against poverty. The concept caught on, and very quickly Oxfam shops appeared on every street corner. Today, they number 560 (they were 630 before the pandemic), managed by an army of 23,000 volunteers.
Oxfam branches in Australia, the United States and the Commonwealth countries gradually came into being, until it was decided in 1995 to create an Oxfam confederation made up of affiliated NGOs. Twenty-one in number, they operate in nearly 87 countries. Oxfam International’s secretariat is based in Nairobi, while campaign and fundraising agencies are located in Seoul, Stockholm and Buenos Aires. Its annual revenue of more than £900m comes one-third from government and international institutions, such as the UN and EU, and donations. They are then redistributed up to 70% in aid programs, in particular to developing countries or countries at war.
With 10,000 employees and 50,000 volunteers, the Oxfam confederation has de facto become one of the most powerful charitable organizations in the world, with the same stated goal as when it started: to fight against poverty, inequalities – in particular gender inequalities – and injustice. However, good intentions do not prevent scandals or excesses. Since 2010, Oxfam has had to deal with and manage a series of cases. This made the new director of Oxfam GB, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, appointed in 2019 to bring order, say: “Doing good cannot be an excuse for tolerating evil.” The evil ? “Orgies worthy of Caligula”, according to witnesses, between underage Haitian prostitutes and Oxfam employees in 2010, which did not fail to tarnish the image of the organization. In the spring of 2021, the same abuses by Oxfam employees are also revealed by whistleblowers, but this time in the DRC, and they have been going on for six years. Urging the organization to clean up its ranks, the British government withdrew its financial aid for four years, until last year. Investigations are carried out, internal procedures reviewed and corrected, and bad apples dismissed.
Oxfam must now regain its moral authority, and quickly. And too bad if it is in defiance of the nuance and sometimes of the facts. Thanks to its shock studies on poverty, the organization presents itself as a herald of the weak and the oppressed, and intends to influence public policies. Published each year to coincide with the meetings of the Davos Economic Forum, these studies strike minds with their alarmist message… and offend a growing number of economists with their risky approximations. Already in January 2018, the British think tank Center for Policy Studies warned: “Talking about faulty methodology is understatement. Oxfam is increasingly polluting the international debate with its dubious statistics and a highly politicized false narrative. The aim is to influencing public policies and moving them away from a market capitalism which has nevertheless succeeded in its history in lifting billions of people out of poverty.”
A re-education of minds
Internally too, Oxfam wants to re-educate minds. Eighteen months ago, documents intended for the training of its employees in Great Britain reached the Daily Telegraph. Adopting the sectarian language of wokism, it is mentioned that “privileged white women” maintain institutional violence against men belonging to discriminated minorities, for example when they report them to the police after a rape. Oxfam GB also recommends that its employees read Me, Not You. The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism by Alison Phipps, an all-out attack on white feminists who participate in white supremacy and “systemic racism”.
For British author Louise Perry, a specialist in gender issues, it is an opportunistic choice. Not knowing how to extricate itself from above after all these scandals, Oxfam decided to adopt a simplistic and moralistic ideology. “It is precisely the lack of nuance that is reassuring and attractive to the organization. In their simplistic world, the enemy is clearly defined”, the rich and “the cis-hetero-white patriarchy”, in other words the heterosexual patriarchy non trans white. “All you have to do is follow the marked path of change.”