Search results

In response to President Biden’s nomination of former MasterCard and Nestlé executive, Ajay Banga, to the position of World Bank president, Christian Donaldson, Oxfam International’s senior policy advisor on international financial institutions, made the following statement: “While Mr. Banga may have extensive experience on Wall Street, we had hoped that President Biden would use this opportunity to ditch the old gentlemen’s agreement of World Bank and IMF appointments in favor of a more transparent and merit-based global process."

Developing countries have been hit with an endless tide of inadequate gestures and broken promises from rich countries and pharmaceutical companies, who are failing to deliver billions of doses they promised while blocking the real solutions to vaccine inequality, according to a new report published today by the People’s Vaccine Alliance. 

Patients living in poverty in the Global South are being bankrupted by private healthcare corporations backed by multi-million-dollar investments from development finance institutions (DFIs) run by the UK, French, German and other rich country governments. DFIs like the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) invest public funds via the private sector to help foster economic development in the Global South and tackle poverty. However, Oxfam published two investigations on DFI funding into private hospital chains and other for-profit healthcare corporations operating in low- and middle-income countries and found cases of them.   

Despite promises, nearly three-quarters of African governments reduced their agricultural budgets while paying almost double that on arms.

“People have become complacent about COVID-19. Our global (health) funds are fast running out of money. Vaccine inequity is getting worse,” said former UK prime minister Gordon Brown today. 

Over 1,000 health professionals from 66 countries have signed a letter urging the G20 to cancel the debt of developing countries, ahead of tomorrow’s extraordinary G20 Finance Ministers meeting.

While the United States faces the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression because of COVID-19, a subset of corporations is reaping dramatic profits that are flowing to their already wealthy, mostly white male shareholders, further exacerbating existing inequalities, according to a new analysis released by Oxfam today.

Countries from both the rich and the developing worlds must stop their recriminations and scepticism from derailing vital UN talks, beginning today, to find ways of helping feed the world's 925 million hungry people.

Time is running out for ministers meeting in Paris to boost adaptation funding levels by 2020 and agree to set new improved finance targets for both adaptation and emissions reductions from when the Paris deal comes into force in 2020, Oxfam said today.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund cannot allow political and economic shocks to hijack their ambitions to combat climate change and curb inequality, warned Oxfam.