Roger Pallars English: Intermon Oxfam

04/10/2012

According to its website, Intermon Oxfam is an Non-governmental organization (NGO) which provides help to poor countries by developing numerous projects. Mainly, they take part in two different areas: lack of food and first necessity goods, with a project called Grow and development of public health and education, working out in the Health & Education for all program. Basically, what Intermon Oxfam aims is to end up with hunger and to provide, as much as posible, a positive and secure future to the poor young population. The Grow project is the most important one, and it is divided in four areas of actuation: land grabs, climate change, food price spikes and support for smale-scale farming. In the land grabs project, they are trying to stop the present situation: big investors are not only buying land for a low price, but also kicking off families that use these lands to grow food. Probably, climate change is the most challenging problem the human being has ever had. Oxfam is helping local farmers to be up-to-date with agreements in UN summits. Another problem Oxfam is dealing with is food price spikes, which are caused by other facts as climate change or intensive agriculture. In this topic, they are trying to find a more effective way of solving these food crisis, for example, supporting smalescale farming, which is the fourth actuation area. To sum up, they are focused on healping poor and local people instead of big institutions. Their goal is to help poor farmers on developing an eco-friendly agriculture by solving the four problems described. Health & Education for all is another important Oxfam project, based on providing a quality public health system and an education capable of providing hope to poor young people. In the health issue, they try to remark the importance of having a universal and developed public health system, especially in the countries where global recession is having a great impact. In education, they challenge big difficulties in poor countries, where there are economic and cultural reasons to avoid children going to school. So, they are trying to increase public services in order to improve the quality of living of poor countries.

It seems to me that Oxfam is doing a great work, because they are very conscious of what poor countries really need. I agree with them the fact of working in the poor villages in direct contact with people instead of dealing with governments, which are likely to be corrupt. They are also developping projects in key issues, such as the climate change, which, in my point of view, are the ones to focus on. All in all, I really admire their work and the fact that they try to be effective by focusing on strategic problems but not trying to solve them at once.