Asewi Kuoaou is a member of a cocoa grower co-op in Yao, Ivory Coast. Photo by Peter DiCampo/Oxfam.

Are you on Instagram? If not, now might be a good time to sign up. This week, renowned photojournalists and curators of the Everyday Africa project, Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill, are taking over Oxfam America’s Instagram account!

You might remember hearing about the Everyday Africa project from us back in September. Originally, Peter and Austin teamed up to counteract the extreme media images of Africa by sharing photos from across the continent of the mundane and familiar, which are equally, if not more enthralling. Now their work has expanded to be featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and this week, The New Yorker.

They are posting photos (like the one above) from their recent trip to the Ivory Coast to learn about women cocoa farmers. In the Ivory Coast, like in many countries, women are responsible for the majority of food production, despite having limited access to markets, land, and credit. If women had equal access to resources, their efforts could reduce world hunger, lower child malnutrition, and raise the incomes of rural people around the world. As a part of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, we are working hard to ensure that rural farmers, especially women, have the ability to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Follow us on Instagram at @OxfamAmerica to see all of their photos from the field.

Adoaga Ousmane searches for bits of grain stored by ants. It's just the first step in an arduous process of finding and preparing food. Photo by Abbie Trayler-Smith

Women digging through anthills for bits of grain to feed their children is one of the most stark images of hunger in the Sahel region of West Africa, where a food crisis is affecting more than 18 million people. The grain—if women find any stashed there by ants—is hardly enough to satisfy a family. And unearthing it is only one of the laborious steps this coping strategy demands.

Here, in the words of Adoaga Ousmane, a  widow caring for her own children as well as several grandchildren, is what many women in the Guéra region of Chad are enduring. Thin and light-headed with hunger, Ousmane can spend five hours in a round-trip walk to the anthills when she can find no other source of food: Read the rest of this entry »

"Everyone is hungry. There is nothing to eat," says Raha Souley, who was planting beans after some rain finally fell. Photo: Caroline Gluck/Oxfam

Caroline Gluck is a humanitarian press officer for Oxfam. She is reporting from Niger.

I’ve been left with some haunting images over the last few days as I’ve travelled in Niger to document the country’s worsening food crisis.

A mother who brought in her emaciated one year old son to a malnutrition clinic, weighing half the normal average weight for a child of his age.  She was so under-nourished herself that she had no breast milk to feed him.

Families who supplement cassava and millet flour with wild leaves and berries to fill their stomachs.  Proud livestock herders for whom their animals are their sole source of income – literally, their bank accounts–forced to sell them at bargain basement prices.  And a drive through an area I have dubbed the animal graveyard – a journey of more than four miles where I counted more than 70 dead animals half-buried in the bleached desert sand. Some lay under the shade of a tree, their bared teeth grinning grimly from their sunken skulls. Read the rest of this entry »

Women dig through anthills in search of small amounts of grain the insects have stored there. Photo by Oxfam

“Five years ago the world ignored warning signs from Niger, failed to act rapidly, and lives were lost. The international community cannot make the same mistake again.”

Those are the words of Mamadou Biteye, a regional director for Oxfam in West Africa sounding the alarm for a food crisis that, so far, has failed to penetrate the consciousness of much of the western world. The stunning thing is it’s affecting 10 million people across the Sahel region of West Africa—10 million people who are scrambling to find enough to eat.

What does that mean?

For women in the Chadian village of Djaya, it means rising early and spending the day under the hot sun digging through anthills in search of small cashes of grain stored there by insects. If they’re lucky, some of them can scrape together about five and a half pounds from a day’s work. 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 »

Madame Sidibe Traore. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America

The best part of visiting small villages in Mali is both the coming and the going.

On arrival, you have to first visit the chief, who usually delivers a formal series of welcoming comments in Bambara, punctuated by the visitors responding at the end of each statement. Someone then usually explains why you are there, and the chief gives you permission to work in the village. Read the rest of this entry »