poverty

Oxfam International Executive Director, Winnie Byanyima, will use the WEF Africa meeting in Kigali, Rwanda this week to call for a radical overhaul in the way African countries manage the income from natural resources, an end to tax havens and the use of progressive taxation to fight inequality.

The Dutch Development Finance Company (FMO) and Finland’s Finnfund, two of the development banks backing the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project in Honduras, yesterday announced they would seek an exit to their involvement in the project. Today’s announcements are important in bringing us one step closer to finally shutting down the tainted Agua Zarca project.

The international community must plug a $2 billion funding gap for countries hit by El Nino-related drought and storms. These have left a staggering 60 million people around the world facing crop failures and worsening hunger.

The impact of the Syria crisis on Lebanon is immense and multidimensional. This report is the result of research by Oxfam and the American University, Beirut in an effort to gain a better insight into the lives and struggles of poor Lebanese households alongside Syrian and Palestinian refugee populations in Lebanon.

Runaway inequality has created a world where 62 people own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population – a figure that has fallen from 388 just five years ago, according to an Oxfam report published today ahead of the annual gathering of the world’s financial and political elites in Davos.

Oxfam said it is vital that governments return to the negotiating table before the new agreement takes effect from 2020 to strengthen pledges of emissions cuts and agree to new finance levels. 

Oxfam commended the World Bank for connecting the need to tackle climate change with the urgent fight to end poverty. In a new report, the Bank warned that more than 100 million additional people could be pushed into poverty by crop failures, floods, hunger, and other shocks caused by climate change. 

Oxfam is disappointed that the EU’s planned new “Trust Fund for Africa”, intended to address migration, risks being used more for border security purposes, rather than fighting poverty and inequality.

The Credit Suisse report today shows that the number of millionaires is rising despite slowed economic Inequality is growing faster than we had thought – Oxfam predicted the richest one percent would own more than the rest of us by 2016. The fact that it has happened this year underlines the urgency of the problem.