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The COVID-19 Roadblock: Community quarantines isolated communities but cut farmers off from markets and consumers

Haifa, HBCC Stigma Stories (Illustration: Vina Salazar/Oxfam)

Stigma Stories: An OFW's Journey Home

Haifa is one of the many overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) forced to go back home when the pandemic began. She had been working as a domestic helper in Oman for the past three years. Her contract had expired and the lower demand for OFW domestic helpers made her decide to go back to the Philippines...

The New Normal Food Chain: App + Favorite Fruit Vendor + Neighborhood Tricycle Driver

Market vendors needed to sell to their customers confined at home. Motorized rickshaw drivers needed a new route to earn money. An app and a community initiative brought them all together.

Sabel, HBCC Stigma Stories (Illustration: Vina Salazar/Oxfam)

Stigma Stories: A Sisters' Reunion

For Sabel, it was like a scene from a movie. It was around 11:00 in the evening when a police car rushed through their quiet street, waking up the neighbourhood. Suddenly, the police came down from the vehicle and rushed to their house to collect her sisters. “We felt like criminals,” she shared,...

“The strength of my resolve to champion the rights of young women and girls is far greater than any fear of challenging long-held cultural practices or beliefs. If we will not stand up for our human rights, who else will?”, said campaigner Sittie Mohamad of Al-Mujadilah Development Foundation, a women’s rights organization based in Lanao del Sur campaigning to end child marriage in the Philippines. (Photo was taken in March 2020, before the Covid-19 lockdown) Photo Credit: Vina Salazar/Oxfam

Girls Not Brides – weaving the ‘evidence quilt’ for gender transformative law reform

Girls have been given much reason to hope in the Philippines. This November, a historic first, the Senate unanimously approved the Girls Not Brides bill, which proposes to criminalize child marriage .

Ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health care starts with robust data

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, women's choices and rights to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) care have been deprioritized and ignored.

A SEASON FILLED WITH HOPE, CARE, AND REFLECTION

In the Philippines, Oxfam, together with our local partners, are providing immediate aid and support to the most affected communities in areas affected by Covid-19 in Eastern Samar, armed conflict in Mindanao, and the succession of destructive typhoons in October and November 2020 that battered...

Women at the heart of peacebuilding

This International Day of Peace 2020, we are putting into highlight the leadership of four women pushing for conflict transformation in their own work.

A worker weighs bananas in a packing plant in Davao de Oro. Most women in the banana farming industry work in these plants, each handling hundreds of trimmed banana clusters per day. (Photo: Dada Grifon/IDEALS)

Connecting the dots: How Bangko Sentral’s new sustainable finance framework can benefit farmers and businesses post-COVID

Last April, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), or the Philippine Central Bank, signed a Sustainable Finance Framework for all banks in the Philippines. The framework is a gamechanger for local finance. In the next three years, banks in the country will be required to adopt sustainability...

The Role of Financial Technology in Disaster Recovery Efforts

Digital financial technology is playing a role in helping communities in the recovery effort. Oxfam has partnered with Singapore based FinTech, LenddoEFL, for its digital identity verification solution, known as electronic know your customer (eKYC). This technology allows the user’s identity to be...

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