Oxfam and Voluntary Aid

Changing charity
Chris Brazier traces the evolution of voluntary aid over the past three decades.

In black and white
Some charity images of the Third World, past and present - and what they mean.

View from the village
Journalists from Brazil, Zambia and Bangladesh discover what the recipients of aid in the Third World really think of Oxfam projects.

Meditation on a bucket of lugworms
Larger forces loom over the granting of aid to poor countries. A quandary at dawn for relief worker Tony Vaux.

Of Mickey Mouse and hunger
How much is your conscientious consumption helping Third World producers? Rachel Sylvester investigates alternative trading.

VOLUNTARY AID - THE FACTS

The end of total war
Maggie Black shatters a myth and tells the true story of how Oxfam began.

Does India need its own Oxfam?
The case for. The case against. And plenty of accusations. You, the jury, decide.

Simply - how voluntary aid works

Scandal in the family
Oxfam Quebec has been accused of 'crotch- shot' fund-raising tactics. Should it be expelled from the fold? Sue Montgomery puts the question.

Guarding the ideal
Oxfam Canada runs its house more democratically than most aid agencies. But all that could change... Stephen Dale reports.

The NI hasn't tackled an issue quite so close to home since the day back in 1976 that it published an issue that looked at itself and how the magazine was produced. That edition profiled the guy who oversaw the printing machine, the distributors to the news-stands and so on in a rather bizarre attempt to demystify the process of publishing a magazine. That's also what these letters from the editor are supposed to do.

In this case I need to use this space, as the lawyers say, to 'declare an interest'. This magazine was started in Britain in 1970 with financial backing from Oxfam which lasted through till 1979. We have been completely independent of them ever since though we have retained a friendly relationship and done the odd small contract job. I have just finished work, for instance, on a book about Vietnam for Oxfam UK (now there's a brazen plug...). We pick the brains of their regional experts; they sell our Third World Calendar in their catalogue.

The connections don't stop there. The NI's Canadian office is run from a rented room inside the Toronto branch of Oxfam Canada, one of whose board members is also an NI co-editor. The NI's Australian office, similarly, is based inside the Melbourne headquarters of Community Aid Abroad (CAA), the Australian Oxfam. And two of our part-time workers in Australia also work for CAA.

Such close ties mean that we have something of an insider's understanding of how these major charities work. But does it mean we are biased in favour of Oxfam, that we will do an obliging whitewash job for the organization in its fiftieth anniversary year? Frankly, there would be no point. We have not worked long and hard to establish this magazine's independent voice only to waste it by churning out another piece of glossy promotion for a group of charities that have plenty of access to the mainstream press.

What we've chosen to do instead is to criticize where we feel it is most justified - Oxfam Quebec takes some stick, for example - but more generally to use the Oxfam idea as a convenient symbol of voluntary aid and Western attitudes to the Third World. Ideas have changed radically over the years and in one sense development charities are grappling today with a problem of their own making. Back in the 1960s they filled our heads with the notion that the Third World was full of starving, passive people - a gigantic begging bowl waiting for the crumbs from our table to drop into it.

It has been part of the Oxfam mission over the years to change that image, to set free that freeze-frame in our minds. Societies in Africa, Asia and Latin America are even more richly diverse than our own, and their people have the same wish to take charge of their destiny as we do of ours. This is a large part of the NI's mission too - and to that extent we are happy to declare an interest.

Letters
Letter from India
Updates
Reviews: plus Galeano classic
Curiosities
Endpiece by Kit Garbett
Country profile: Senegal

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