How we fight poverty

The injustice of poverty demands a powerful and practical response to address both its causes and its impact on peoples' lives. Using a six-sided strategy to weave together the complex web of our efforts and joining with others, we seek to overcome poverty.

• When people have the power to claim their basic human rights, they can escape poverty – permanently. This core belief underpins our development programs in more than 90 countries. With our partners, allies and with local communities, we help people to claim rights for themselves.
• Human development is driven by empowered women. But women and girls are still massively under represented and often oppressed. We work to help them speak out and demand justice, and to assert their leadership. The right to gender justice underpins all of our work.
• When disaster strikes, we are there. We help people caught up in natural disasters and conflict. We typically provide clean water, food and sanitation in disaster zones. As far as we can, we strive to ensure that civilians are protected too. We also seek to reduce the risk to poor people of future disasters by continuing to work with them long after the immediate crisis is over.
• Natural resources are vital for prosperity and poor people are often not getting their fair share. This situation is worsened by the impacts of climate change that the international community is failing to address properly. We lobby governments, international organizations and corporations for fairer land policies and action on climate change.
• To stop people going hungry, we work to secure global food supplies so that people always have enough to eat. Already, almost a billion of us go to bed hungry every night. Not because there isn't enough. But because of the deep injustice in the way the food system works. We can GROW in a better way – one that contributes much more to human wellbeing.
• Being able to access basic services such as health and education is essential to people’s well-being and to human development. We push to secure adequate financial flows to sustain basic services for poor people. (http://www.oxfam.org/en/about/how-oxfam-fights-poverty)