A food seller in the market in Port-au-Prince, May 2010. Photo: Ami Vitale / Oxfam America

If you’ve been following the news, you know things in Haiti have been sounding pretty grim of late. Between the stories of the cholera epidemic affecting nearly 20,000 people, and issues of voting irregularities during the recent presidential elections, it can seem like the situation hasn’t improved much since the devastating earthquake that struck the capital last January. When two of my colleagues left for Haiti earlier this week to capture people’s perspectives on the one-year anniversary of the quake, I couldn’t help but worry about what they might find.

But if you look closely, there’s also been a trickle of good news mixed in with the bad. Recently, The New York Times published “Can Microlending Save Haiti?” , a look at how microloans are helping small businesses get back on their feet. While the story noted, rightly, that microlending isn’t a perfect solution, it did capture the resilience of Haitian business owners, many of whom have rebuilt in the face of overwhelming losses.

“I want to make my own money and care for my family,” entrepreneur Marie Ange Joute told The Times about her business selling eggs and heating oil from her house. “I want to provide for us if something goes bad. I know how to work.”

Many of Oxfam’s programs in Haiti are designed around people’s determination to get working again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few years I have visited a lot of communities affected by large-scale mining projects. In Honduras, Mali, Peru, Ghana, Guatemala, Cambodia, or Senegal, I usually hear about more or less the same problems: loss of land, loss of jobs, pollution, and despair.

No matter how much you hear about these problems, seeing them in the small towns, villages, and in the homes of people remembering a lost way of life is always shocking. I was reminded of this most recently in a small village called Faloumbou, in the far eastern border of Senegal. The entire village of 650 people, including all 35 of its farming families, had lost all the agricultural land they had used to grow millet, maize, and ground nuts. The government gave it to an Australian mining company. All their fields are now part of an open-pit gold mine. No one in Faloumbou had received any sort of compensation for lost land.

The chief of the village, Kourou Keita, asks a simple question: “We don’t know anything but farming, so if you take the land from us, how can we survive?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Zeenat Potia / Oxfam America

My initial impression of the village of Sirakoro, Mali, was an explosion of color. The women were dressed in bold prints, often with twirled head scarves, and yet their dazzling outfits contrasted sharply with the mud brown backdrop of their village. On the surface level, to my untrained eye, the poverty in Mali was different from the stark, in-your-face urban poverty that I grew up around in Mumbai, India. Here the struggles seemed subtle to a visitor, but were equally if not harsher. No running water or electricity, scarcity of food, and lack of adequate schools—to name a few.

I traveled to Mali recently to attend a conference on Saving for Change, Oxfam’s innovative microfinance program that empowers women through small, rural, community-based autonomous savings and lending groups. Saving for Change is now reaching 300,000 women, in almost half of the 10,000 villages in Mali. We went to six different remote villages and had the opportunity to see the savings groups conduct their meetings, and to talk with individual members about their experiences.

Despite President Obama’s assertion last week in his speech during the Millennium Development Goals Summit that the delivery of medicines to Mali is improving the health systems there, the UNDP statistics on Mali continue to be humbling. The overall illiteracy rate is 73.8 percent, with women faring much worse, and the average life expectancy is 48.1 years.

Yet, here we were witnessing change in difficult circumstances. The savings groups are comprised of about twenty women, and they sit around a circle conducting their business orally, often repeating the amount that each woman contributes, since no written records exist.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: David Stubbs / Oxfam America

Sometimes it’s the small details that can make a photo compelling. In the above image from Peru, the visual beauty of the blue sky constrasts starkly with the reality of the subject matter: the barbed wire, chain-link fence, and plateaus of digging around a mineral mine in Cerro de Pasco, Peru.

Photo: Rebecca Blackwell / Oxfam America

Members of a village savings group in Mali. Rebecca Blackwell’s photo beautifully captures the graphic details of the vivid fabrics that the women are wearing, as well as this gesture of welcome and respect that the women use to begin their meetings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leaders of a Saving for Change group in Zantiebougou-Fala, Mali, keep track of deposits at a group meeting. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

Interesting news: we just heard that our Saving for Change program has broken the 250,000 participant barrier. According to the message we just got from our VP John Ambler, Saving for Change now has “more than 250,000 members, and operates in more than 6,000 villages on three continents.” This makes Saving for Change one of Oxfam America’s largest non-humanitarian programs.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been looking at the photos we got from Senegal-based photographer Rebecca Blackwell from a trip in March in Mali to visit several Saving for Change groups in the southern part of the country near Bougouni. I want to share a few of Rebecca’s portraits and some quotes from the women we met, just because I have been thinking about them lately. I detected a common theme in each village and group: dignity. The women described how saving and borrowing money from their group helped them manage their affairs independently. You can see pride in their faces, and hear it in their words.

Soumba Doumbia. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

Soumba Doumbia, mid 30s, three children, sells cloth and clothing to earn extra money.

“Before we established our group, we had no hope. If we had problems and needed money, we had to go to a nearby town and borrow it. We would ask people here for help, but they did not always say yes. Now we can find money for our problems from the group.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Fanta Niambaly, president of the Saving for Change group in Banakoro, in southern Mali. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

I just spent two days visiting Saving for Change groups in southern Mali. Saving for Change teaches women to save money and start small business ventures.

The women always have a look in their eyes that conveys real dignity and just a bit of fire as they describe their businesses, and how the money they earn is helping their families. Most can say their children have decent clothes and are in school, the family is eating better, and they are saving money.

Fanta Niambaly, 52, is president of one Saving for Change group in the village of Banakoro. She says the 29 women in her group are changing the way they see themselves and their place in the community. “We are proud of our businesses, and we are learning to become entrepreneurs,” she says, squinting in the sun.

In other villages women say they are now included in village councils and help make decisions on important matters like the maintenance of wells and new pumps. But are women sharing any decision-making power beyond their traditional roles of carrying water and caring for children? Do their husbands respect their opinions in family and village matters? Can they own property, be the mayor, or carry out other official duties? Read the rest of this entry »

With 2008 behind us, we’re highlighting photos we think best capture Oxfam’s work last year. Here’s a photo of one of my favorite people. More to come from others.

My boss, Jane, has a saying. She wants the writers to “narrow the distance” between the poor people we work with and our readers here in The States. So, when each of us heads out into the field, we keep this mission in mind, filling our notebooks with the voices of the people we meet and the stories they have to tell.

Every year, a few people’s stories stand out. Sometimes it’s because of the sheer adversity they face. Other times, it’s the great success they’ve seen and the simplicity of the solutions they pursued. The woman I’m thinking of falls into the latter category. Her name is Seng Sreila, and I have visited her home twice in two years. She’s a rice farmer in Cambodia who took out a series of small loans from her village savings group to start her own business. With that money, she’s milling rice for other farmers in her village. Her success has become well-known in her community, and her status, that of a local celebrity.

The first time I met her, Sreila gave us the kind of welcome that’s typical of the people we meet during our travels. She was kind of shy, but had this beautiful smile that popped up whenever she was nervous. After just a few hours of talking, she treated us like good friends. When we were gathering our things to leave, she grabbed my arm in a familiar way, and walked me back to our car. As she thanked me for coming, she held my hands. I remember how hers felt; they were small, like mine.

Seng Sreila in June 2008 showing off her rice mill. Photo by Inazio.

Read the rest of this entry »

Minata Konaré is proud of what she and others have done in her Saving for Change group in Mali. “This is our own money,” she says. Brett Eloff/Oxfam America photo

With the abrupt economic downturn I have to wonder what will happen to US foreign aid budgets when the new president assumes office. Barack Obama originally said he will double foreign aid to $50 billion by the fourth year of his administration, if he can get elected. Earlier this month he said he will probably have to re-evaluate this plan, but that he does not intend to cut the foreign aid budget. It seems certain: Whoever becomes the next president may have to devote more treasure to bailing out banks and other unforeseen expenses.

Read the rest of this entry »