In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father, Brian Hartley, worked for Oxfam during a famine in Uganda’s Kara-moja. Like Dad, the other Oxfam people I remember in East Africa were earnest agriculturalists or engineers who had been overseas most of their lives. Some of them were religious or socialist, but they all had the technical skills to help local farmers rebuild their lives after wars or droughts.
The focus was on development. Like my dad, most were sandal-clad volunteers who worked for the charity for free. They helped farmers cultivate better crops or breed improved livestock to stop soil erosion, vaccinate cattle, plant trees and dig boreholes.
Since Quakers founded Oxfam in the 1940s to help civilians in Greece, it has saved and improved countless lives. I admired the charity so much that while at university I would secretly (because I feared my fellow undergraduates might laugh at me) visit its headquarters in north Oxford to do odd jobs.
As a correspondent for Reuters in the 1990s, I came across Oxfam in Somalia, Central Africa and Ethiopia. Africa’s humanitarian crises were now known as ‘complex emergencies’ or, in the case of South Sudan, the ‘permanent emergency’: war, famine, pestilence and death on a vast scale. Once again I saw Oxfam technicians doing impressive, hands-on work for civilians in refugee camps, delivering clean water and food.
Around the turn of the century, during Tony Blair’s government, everything suddenly changed. UK charities like Oxfam had failed to move on from the cycle of emergency to sustainable development, and yet the crises were getting bigger and nastier and the do-gooders had never been in such demand. Budgets exploded. Aid groups got so much money they could hardly keep up with the ‘burn rate’, which is what they call the need to spend funds before the end of a financial year so that donors do not cut the flow of future cash.
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