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An Oxfam sign in Corail, a camp for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
An Oxfam sign in Corail, a camp for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Photograph: Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters
An Oxfam sign in Corail, a camp for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Photograph: Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters

Shamed and fearful, Oxfam stumbles into the unknown

This article is more than 6 years old
Ten days of damaging ‘sex scandal’ headlines for Oxfam have rocked public trust in the whole sector. How can it be restored?

At an Oxfam shop in Haringey, north London, a volunteer was rearranging the window display. “People have been very nice and supportive,” she said, looking back on a week that has left the charity in turmoil. “The negative effect will be on the people we support.”

The mood of her response – slightly defensive, fearful and full of foreboding – will be shared in Oxfam and other charity shops up and down Britain this weekend. To call the last 10 days hellish seems like an understatement. In no time at all, the reputation of one of Britain’s major charities has been shredded. The question now is whether a venerable, well-intentioned organisation has been damaged beyond repair.

Sweden, a high-profile donor, has already suspended funding to Oxfam pending an investigation – a move that will hit programmes in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. Oxfam has agreed to withdraw from bidding for UK government funding until the Department for International Development is satisfied that it can meet the “high standards” expected. Last year the UK government gave £31.7m to Oxfam, almost 10% of the charity’s funding.

Contemplating the devastating fallout from a shocking, upsetting scandal, Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, went into defensive mode, telling the Guardian this weekend that criticism of the charity was “out of proportion to the level of culpability”. He added that no one had “murdered babies in their cots”.

Those remarks led to a new wave of disapproval. But one whistleblower, who spoke out against sexual exploitation at Oxfam, said they feared the charity was being unfairly targeted. They went public hoping to make not just Oxfam but the entire industry more proactive in handling a problem many aid workers say is widespread. Now they feared it was being treated as a single charity’s failure. “Yes, it was a mistake for them to let [Haiti] happen. It was management incompetence,” the former Oxfam employee said. “The bottom line is you just can’t make Oxfam a scapegoat when this is a sector-wide issue. All donors, all international NGOs, all agencies need to work together.”

Quick Guide

How the Oxfam-Haiti controversy unfolded

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What happened in Haiti?

Oxfam GB has been accused of covering up an inquiry into whether its staff used sex workers in Haiti in 2011 during a relief effort following the previous year’s earthquake. It is alleged those who were paid by the aid workers may have been underage. An investigation by the Times found that Oxfam had allowed three men to resign and sacked four others for gross misconduct after an inquiry into sexual exploitation, the downloading of pornography, bullying and intimidation.

How much money could Oxfam lose?

The UK government has threatened to cut funds to Oxfam unless it shows “moral leadership”. In 2016-17, Oxfam’s income was £408.6m, according to its annual report, including £31.7m from the DfID. Aidan Warner of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations said: “They will be concerned not just about the money but the endorsement that the relationship with DfID represents, and they are clearly working hard to regain the confidence of the government as well as the public.” 

How much does the DfID give to NGOs?

Last year the UK government dedicated £13.3bn to international aid. About £1.2bn of UK aid is spent annually through NGOs. In 2016, the UK was one of only six countries to spend 0.7% of gross national income on aid, a target set by the UN for all developed countries. Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, has said the UK remains committed to this target, despite some Tory MPs calling for it to be dropped.

Should other NGOs be worried?

A number have now been implicated. Some of the employees involved in the Haiti case went on to work for other NGOs. Over the weekend, the Sunday Times also reported that more than 120 workers from Britain’s leading charities have been accused of sexual abuse in the past year. Save the Children, which in 2016 secured multi-year contracts worth £91m with the government, had 31 cases, 10 of which were referred to the police. The British Red Cross, which admitted a “small number of cases of harassment reported in the UK”, received £16.3m in DfID funding.

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Sweden’s decision to suspend payments was an extremely worrying development, said Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Centre for Global Development. “It creates political pressure on other donors who then have to justify to their political masters – why are you continuing funding Oxfam when Sweden isn’t?” he said. “What’s driving this right now is impulse – there’s a really ugly story dominating the headlines and there’s an urgency to show action.”

One former trustee said she was confident that donors would not cut funds in the long run but worried that individual donations might suffer. “I suspect the thing people will be most worried about will be reputation and the impact of that on fundraising.” More than 1,000 direct debits to the charity were cancelled last weekend, and several high-profile ambassadors, including Desmond Tutu, withdrew their support. Almost half of the charity’s income comes from donations, legacies and its trading sales.

Rupert Younger, director of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, said there was certainly a risk of serious long-term damage. “The thing about the NGO and charity sector is that it’s more viscerally important to us as individuals than corporations. It’s partly because there is a degree of taxpayer funding, so there is a question of integrity in managing our money. And also because this is a sector where they are looking after and safeguarding very vulnerable communities. So damaging the very people they purport to help is hypocrisy on an emotional scale.”

Research showed that reputation was visible through two lenses, he added: capability and character. “Oxfam in one sense began with a classic character problem. No one was doubting that they do good relief work but people were very upset about revelations about the behaviour of key people,” said Younger. But while character problems can normally be resolved through a change of leadership, the problem for Oxfam now is a possible perception of governance failure.

“Leaders saying that they didn’t know these things were going on – for example, recent comments by the head of Oxfam International – or a wider sense that they have not tried to cover up what they knew, leads to serious questions about their structure and governance.”

The irony, say experts, is that Oxfam had been doing better than other NGOs in confronting sexual abuse. Campaigners point out that Oxfam’s inquiry into Haiti prompted an overhaul of its reporting systems on abuse, including creation of a new safeguarding team. “Oxfam does have, according to our research, one of the best, if not the best, safeguarding units among international NGOs or in the UN,” said Dyan Mazurana, associate research professor at Tufts University in the US, who has studied how aid charities tackle sexual abuse between staff members.

Oxfam had been criticised for reporting higher numbers of sexual misconduct allegations, she said, but this was because employees were confident enough to make complaints. “The big failure from Oxfam has been, at the highest level, not acting on those reports,” she said. “When the head of their global safeguarding unit [raised concerns], they didn’t give her the resources she needed, and they don’t follow through with the punishment [to perpetrators],” she said.

Megan Nobert, a human rights lawyer who founded Report the Abuse, the first organisation to challenge the silence surrounding sexual violence in the aid sector, worried that threats of funding cuts to Oxfam would deter other organisations from talking openly about how they were tackling sexual abuse. “I’m genuinely concerned that all of the negative attention that’s been brought to Oxfam for having procedures, for having high numbers of cases, for taking this seriously, could have a cooling effect on organisations,” she said. When approached by the Thomson Reuters Foundation last week, only six out of 10 global aid agencies were willing to disclose the number of sexual abuse allegations made against staff.

Donor governments were also nervous, said Mazurana. She recently advised a government donor on introducing a better reporting system for cases of sexual exploitation and abuse among peacekeeping troops, and recommended it look at Oxfam’s policies: “They said, ‘But if we get a better reporting unit, we’re going to get more reports?’ I said ‘Yes, that’s right’. They were saying – ‘Well then, how do we handle the fallout?’”

An Oxfam shop in London. Thousands of people have cancelled their direct debits to the charity. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian

On Tuesday, Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, will face a committee of MPs which has convened an urgent session to question the charity’s senior management about the allegations. The Department for International Development will also be asked what it knew. Andrew Mitchell, who was international development secretary in 2011, told BBC’s Newsnight that the scandal at Oxfam was a “shudderingly awful tale”, but that he was not certain whether he had been told about the incident when working at the department. Save the Children, which has been drawn into the affair, will also face questions.

Experts in the aid sector believe it is likely that cases involving other NGOs could emerge. While Oxfam’s handling of Haiti was questionable, said Konyndyk, it was not “egregiously poor, certainly in terms of the standards of the industry”.

A former employee in Liberia for Merlin, a charity implicated in the scandal, said sexual exploitation was common, adding that they were aware of some UN peacekeepers in 2004 exchanging food for sex. “Many children did not see their interaction as sexual exploitation but as a normal relationship because they consented,” they said. Local staff at Merlin, which merged with Save the Children in 2013, also hired girls for sex parties, they added.

Staff who raise complaints about issues such as corruption or bullying are not taken seriously. “As locally employed staff, I don’t feel safe whistleblowing on abuse because there is no protection. It is difficult to get victims to speak,” they said, adding that it was often the most powerful staff involved in wrongdoing. “[The power structure] only benefits the seniors. In fact talking to the media is taboo.” The Oxfam reports were a stain on NGOs in Liberia, they said, adding that there were now worries about the impact on funding for programmes.

Oxfam’s reputation has been severely damaged but the charity is taking steps to address its problems and may recover eventually. For the sector as a whole, though, the scandal should trigger profound change. Oxford University’s Rupert Younger expects that corporations will now have many more protections for whistleblowers and protocols for handling abuse. “NGOs have arguably managed to get away with lower standards on trust. That won’t be possible any more,” he concluded.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Oxfam to investigate misconduct claims against staff in DRC

  • Timeline: Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal in Haiti

  • Oxfam to axe jobs and aid programmes in £16m cuts after scandal

  • Haiti shuts down Oxfam GB over prostitution scandal

  • Clare Short is wrong. No wonder sexual abuse is rife in the aid sector

  • Oxfam chief steps down after charity's sexual abuse scandal

  • Oxfam scandal linked to Sport Relief raising a third less on the night

  • Oxfam 'kept aid worker on in Haiti despite sex harassment claims'

  • Oxfam employee who was sexually assaulted 'constructively dismissed'

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