Harriet Nakabaale has named her Kampala yard “Camp Green” for the abundant vegetables she is able to produce from it. Photo: Ami Vitale

It’s planting season where I live north of Boston. I’ve never been very good at getting a garden to grow, which is why I was blown away when I walked through the gate into Harriet Nakabaale’s small city yard in Kampala, Uganda, a few weeks ago. She had planted just about every inch of it—and all of it was green and edible. It was a true victory garden, especially in a place like Kampala where the hard-packed earth in crowded neighborhoods can appear so unforgiving. You just have to know how to work it, like Nakabaale does—patiently, with absolute devotion, and the knowledge that all your hard work will pay off in heaps of healthy vegetables.

For all you would-be gardeners out there, maybe this photo of Nakabaale—snapped in a rare moment of repose—will serve as a bit of inspiration to get you going.

And watch for others that we’ll be sharing. They are part of an ambitious effort to advise the Rockefeller Foundation in identifying promising innovations in African agriculture for small farmers. The idea was to do a scan of work being done across sub-Saharan Africa by our peers as well as local citizen groups, organizations,  governments, and corporations, and then to try to identify ideas and projects that might be both innovative and scalable. We are writing up our findings now for the foundation to present at its centennial celebration in Nigeria in July. In the meantime, we have a treasure trove of great ideas, stories, and pictures–including the one above taken by Ami Vitale—of incredible people and innovations to share with you.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Above, girls collect water from a tap stand in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Below, a boy plays on a street where families hang their laundry.

Zaatari is now home to more than 100,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria. According to UNICEF, half of those refugees are children.

With 2,500 to 3,000 Syrians crossing into Jordan each day, Zaatari is now equivalent in size to the fifth-largest city in Jordan. Fifty thousand people arrived in February alone. Oxfam is helping more than 20,000 refugees in the camp by installing water taps and storage towers, latrines, showers, and laundry areas.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

“We’re surrounded by children for most of the day. We walk together, we eat together, we share stories and dreams,” said Farah al-Basha, an Oxfam engineer working in Zaatari. “When the time comes to leave the camp … We’re thinking about how lovely a shower will be, but [then] the kids come and say ‘see you tomorrow’ and we close the doors with a big smile. … We start thinking about what can we do next for those kids.”

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts.

Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

In Mafraq City in northern Jordan, children and young people lit candles to show their solidarity with the people of Syria. Their vigil was organized by Oxfam’s partner, human rights organization ARDD-Legal Aid, as part of a Global Vigil for Syria to mark the two year anniversary of the conflict. Vigils in 20 countries around the world remembered more than 70,000 Syrians who lost their lives and showed their support for more than one million who have fled their homes and rely on humanitarian assistance from organizations like Oxfam for survival. Their message was one of hope that Syria will be a country of peace and safe haven where their citizens can soon return.

Oxfam’s Areeg Hegazi remembers a vigil in Moustafe Mahmoud Square in Egypt:

“As it was nearing dawn, we started to light up the candles, some of the young men and women started forming the letters ‘Syria’ in Arabic on the floor.  Syrians in the vigil were touched with the numbers of Egyptians there – and by the opportunity to mark the anniversary while they were so far away from home.  As people drove past the vigil, they shared messages of encouragement, ‘inshallaah this would be over soon’ and ‘you’ll go back and reconstruct everything again.’”

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts.

Photo: Percy Ramirez/Oxfam America; click to enlarge

Above, Marlith Amasifuen Ishuiza and her son Bryan Sangama at a community water tap in Aviación, a rural town of about 300 people in Peru’s northern Amazon region. With support from Oxfam, women in Aviación worked together to cultivate a traditional garden, which protects their indigenous Kichwa culture while providing an additional source of food and income for their families.

I thought of my 2012 visit to Avación when I read “The Kids Left Behind by the Boom,” a moving op-ed by journalist Marie Arana that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. With the story of 12-year-old Henrry Ochochoque, Arana touches on many of the same issues that Oxfam’s programs in Peru seek to address: the stark inequalities between the flourishing capital city and the struggling rural villages; the environmental and human costs of out-of-control natural resource extraction; and the still-persistent discrimination that leaves many indigenous people shut out of the country’s recent economic boom.

As Arana points out, these problems affect kids first and foremost. Henrry, and many others like him, are getting “an education that will leave [them] drastically unprepared for the 21st century. … 78 percent of Peru’s indigenous children live in poverty. A third of all rural children suffer chronic malnutrition. … For Henrry, despite his A’s and sunny optimism, the Peruvian boom may as well be on the moon.”

In the face of challenges like this, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. But for Henrry’s sake, and Bryan’s too, I hope we’ll see some changes before they grow up.

Photo: Creativos/Oxfam - click to enlarge

This week’s photo and story comes from Tjarda Muller, Oxfam communications officer in Central America.

Small-business owner Olga Alicia Pérez, pictured, lives in San Miguel Chicaj’, municipality of the department of Baja Verapaz in central Guatemala. “I make ice, jelly and fruit cocktails,” Pérez says. “Thank God, the business is doing well. My son studies and I am able to give him some money for a midday snack, or for the assignments he gets.”

Pérez is a member of an Oxfam Saving for Change group in her community, which helps her to keep her small business afloat. In Saving for Change, groups of 15 to 20 women combine their savings in a group fund. Members can borrow money from the fund to start or revive a small business, buy seeds and fertilizer for their land, or respond to an emergency. In Baja Verapaz, where 70 percent of the population lives in poverty, recurrent droughts as well as heavy rainfalls can devastate crops. Saving for Change provides an opportunity for women to lift themselves and their families out of these crisis situations.

“We fight; we struggle to save some money. This is a beautiful project. Many people in San Miguel Chicaj’ are involved now,” says Pérez.

The benefits of savings groups like these are now reaching far beyond Central America. Last week a group of international organizations, including Oxfam America, announced “50 by 2020,” an initiative to expand savings group membership globally from 6 million to 50 million by 2020.

Photo: George Osodi/Panos for Oxfam America

Comfort Adeniyi, a cocoa farmer, on her farm in Ayetoro-Ijesa in southwest Nigeria. In this portrait by photographer George Osodi, Adeniyi holds a long knife used by farmers for cracking open cocoa pods, weeding fields, and other routine tasks.

Adeniyi’s portrait also appears on Oxfam America’s new fact sheet, Women and the big business of chocolate. Ninety percent of the world’s cocoa is grown by 5.5 million smallholder farmers like Adeniyi, many of whom live below the poverty line. In West Africa, where most cocoa comes from, women do nearly half of the labor on cocoa farms but own just a quarter of the land. They have fewer economic opportunities and, as workers, typically earn less than men.

Fortunately, consumers like us can help (and we don’t even have to give up chocolate). Check out Oxfam’s Behind the Brands scorecard to learn what the world’s biggest food companies could be doing to improve their policies. Then join thousands of others and ask companies to give cocoa growers a fair deal.

Photo: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam

Refugee from Mali in the Mentao Nord camp in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Conflict in northern Mali has displaced roughly 400,000 people, about 160,000 of whom have fled the country, most to Niger, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso. Oxfam has been assisting roughly 150,000 refugees in these countries (as well as the communities that are hosting them), providing clean water and latrines, and promoting good hygiene to reduce vulnerability to diseases. In Mali, Oxfam is helping nearly 60,000 people in the northern part of the country who are in need of food and clean water. We estimate that roughly 2 million people may lack enough food in Mali this year. Armed conflict is restricting access to people in the northern areas where the food needs are most severe, so Oxfam is advocating for humanitarian access and urging the UN to deploy human rights monitors to help stabilize the most insecure areas.

Find out how you can support Oxfam’s work to help people affected by the crisis in Mali.

Photo: Luca Sola/Oxfam

Samira, pictured above in a camp for displaced people in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, is a refugee from the ongoing conflict in Syria.

Samira is living in a self-made shelter with just one room, which she shares with 12 other people. Her home is made from one wall of breezeblocks and finished with plastic sheeting and cardboard boxes. The floor is wet and icy cold, and outside snow melts into the ground, creating icy mud.

“[My family] decided to come to Lebanon because of the fighting that was taking place,” Samira told Oxfam last month. “The shelling and the shooting were happening while we were trying to live peacefully in our homes. It has been eight months since I left my home. I have no idea what happened to it; we just had to leave it behind and escape because of the fighting.”

An estimated 670,000 people have fled violence in Syria to neighboring countries since the onset of the crisis in March 2011. The region is now experiencing harsh winter weather conditions, with heavy rain and snowstorms sending temperatures plummeting to below zero. Many of the displaced are living in shelters with no winter clothes and no blankets.

Oxfam and its local partners have been distributing blankets, mattresses, heaters, gas oil, and other supplies to help the new arrivals stay warm during the harsh winter. Significant funds are needed to reach more refugees before winter takes its toll.

Learn more about how Oxfam is helping Syrian refugees and donate now to support these efforts.

Photo: Holly Pickett/Oxfam America

Sadio Danfakha washes her hands with a tippy-tap, a low-cost, low-tech plastic container used to promote hand washing in places with no running water. Oxfam and our partner AKAD distributed tippy-taps along with soap and bleach (to treat drinking water) as part of our humanitarian program to help people suffering from a dramatic food shortage in 2011-2012.

When I met Danfakha in Senegal last October, she said she had been working closely with Wally Cissokho of AKAD, who is in charge of promoting good hygiene practices as a means to avoid diseases.  “We teach people how to use the hygiene kits, and sometime I show them how to use the kits when Wally is not there.”

Danfakha says that when people starting using the tippy-taps and treated water there were fewer cases of diarrhea in her village, Biatilaye. “We now wash our hands before eating, and we wash our clothes more now. Before, it was hard to get soap to wash our hands, but then Wally came and it is now easier to get soap.”

She says she decided to help promote better hygiene in her village as a volunteer. “I have been going with Wally to distribute the hygiene kits. I do it just to help, because we are all neighbors, and I like to help others.”

“It was not a long time ago that my husband passed away. So I am taking the opportunity to help other people instead of sitting home all alone in the house.”

Photo: Pablo Tosco/Oxfam

Pablo Tosco’s photo of a girl lifting a water jug shows the reality of life for thousands of Malian refugees living in Mentao camp, Burkina Faso.

Since January of last year, more than 370,000 civilians—many of them women and children—have fled northern Mali, with 142,000 finding refuge in neighboring countries such as Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Niger, and an additional 228,000 displaced in southern Mali.

With the recent escalation of the conflict in Mali, the already dire situation for tens of thousands of Malians could get much worse, according to an Oxfam report published earlier this week. “We call on countries neighboring Mali to continue to keep their borders open to allow refugees a safe haven, and for the UN to show the leadership that is needed to deal with the impact of this conflict on Malian refugees and their hosts,” said Oxfam West Africa regional director Mamadou Biteye.

Oxfam is also providing humanitarian assistance to those displaced by the conflict. Although access to those in need within Mali is limited, we are providing aid to nearly 60,000 people in Mali’s Gao region. And in neighboring Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Niger, we are aiding 150,000 refugees and the people struggling to host them. Find out how you can support our efforts.