Barbara Stocking
By Ehtesham Shahid • Apr 30th, 2009The UK-based charity’s chief executive officer tells Ehtesham Shahid what the the largest challenges facing her organization are, and what the Gulf states can do to help.
Since joining Oxfam in May 2001, Stocking has dedicated herself to overcoming poverty across the world. As the chief executive officer of the UK-based charity, she has led humanitarian missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and Pakistan. Stocking spoke to Ehtesham Shahid during her recent trip to Dubai.
How is the financial crisis affecting your organization? How are you adjusting your operations?
One is our direct income. In the UK a lot of people give us money and that, fortunately, is pretty well standing up. But we can get no new donors at the moment because nobody will commit to the future. They will still give for emergencies, such as Congo and Zimbabwe, but not for committing long term. The biggest worry that we have had in terms of our money is the exchange rate. Because we get about half of our money in sterling and we spend in 64 countries, a lot of whom are not linked to the sterling in any way. Then the buying power of our money is much less, and that is a really serious issue for what we can do.
What does that look like, on the ground?
If you are doing water and latrines, or food security work, you just can’t buy so much for your money. But the bigger worry is the impact on poor people across the world, and that picture is only just beginning to unfold. We’ve seen already with the emerging economies, particularly those that are into big export businesses for consumer goods, that they are already getting hit quite substantially. You know, we are hearing all the time about factories closing down in some of the poorer countries, including China. So that’s one of the first effects.
But there are quite a lot of other effects. We are expecting a lot more people to lose their jobs. If they’ve not got jobs, they are not sending money back. And it’s been estimated that actually a quarter of a trillion dollars less money will go back to developing countries in remittances this year. Well again, that’s a lot of money for things like education and healthcare, food security and getting the house fixed.
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