A brief introduction
Oxfam's Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods work
The Oxfam GB Strategic Steer 2007/8 - 2009/10 states that we aim to be "a leading INGO in food security and emergency livelihoods, with sector leadership on alternatives to food aid."
Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods (EFSL) work accounted for approximately 45 per cent of Oxfam's humanitarian expenditure between 2001 and 2006. This is likely to grow steadily over the next three years whilst we focus on further improving the quality of our EFSL work.
The objectives of our emergency food security and livelihoods work is to assist people that are prone to, or affected by, humanitarian crisis:
- to prevent acute malnutrition by helping them to meet their immediate, minimum food needs
- to protect, diversify and recover their livelihoods
In order to achieve these objectives we carry out a range of activities including:
- Nutrition analysis, i.e. surveillance, anthropometric surveys, nutritional causal analysis
- Food security and livelihoods analysis, i.e. monitoring, early warning, emergency food security assessments
- Food distributions, i.e. general food distributions, dry supplementary feeding
- Cash transfer and market access programmes, e.g. cash-for-work, vouchers and cash grants
- Livelihood asset distributions, e.g. seeds, tools, livestock
- Asset de-stocking, e.g. de-stocking of livestock
- Asset protection, e.g. animal health care, flood protection
- Capacity building, e.g. agricultural extension, business skills training
- Advocacy
NB. We do not treat malnutrition through therapeutic or wet supplementary feeding programmes
