This working paper records an exercise carried out by Oxfam GB to map out the range of natural hazards and other risks to which people in Mexico and Central America are exposed. It also relates these to complex social, economic, political, and cultural factors that make some social sectors more critically vulnerable than others in emergencies. Further, it identifies the wide range of local capacities (organizational, social, governmental, and non-governmental) that can contribute to developing effective approaches to disaster prevention and mitigation programs, as well as emergency...

Intense fighting in the Northern Region of Ghana in 1994 and 1995 led to the loss of 15,000 lives and the displacement of 200,000 people. A formal peace treaty, negotiated by the government, ended the fighting but did not address the underlying causes of the conflict, which was a complex mix of economic, political, and ethnic factors.

An informal consortium of NGOs, initially involved in delivering humanitarian aid, set up a parallel peace process, seeking to build up trust through a series of peace-education workshops and the creation of a multi-ethnic Youth and Development...

The late 20th Century saw -men and masculinities- become an increasingly widely-debated theme in gender and development circles, as well as in the wider world of the media, where there is much talk of -men in crisis-, -troubled masculinities-, and 'men at risk'. While the 1970s and 1980s were marked by an unprecedented focus on women among activists, scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers, a perceptibly larger share of the spotlight on gender has since fallen on men. Although women continue to bear a disproportionate share of material, social, and civil disadvantage, trends identified in...

Oxfam, in partnership with Save the Children, conducted a series of annual surveys of the effectiveness of NGO relief efforts in northern Sri Lanka. Men, women and children were interviewed in depth and their perceptions and criticisms were recorded. The results of these surveys were used to inform and improve the relief programme, to make it more responsive to the needs of the displaced communities. This paper offers a critical assessment of the project, describing the methodology, assessing the outcomes and identifying lessons for other agencies interested in conducting similar...