BackProfits do not have to be at the cost of the rights of the poor: Winnie Byanyima
The Oxfam chief on women's rights and why transparency and credibility of the civil society is important
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New Delhi: Winnie Byanyima is executive director of Oxfam International, a confederation of 17 organizations operating in 94 countries working towards alleviating poverty. Born in Uganda in 1959, a time when the country was torn by civil war, the engineer by education went on to become a political activist to free her country from violence. She then became a diplomat, a parliamentarian, a social activist and worked for the United Nations Development Programme. In an interview on a recent visit to India, Byanyima spoke about the challenge of poverty, the responsibilities of civil society and women’s rights. Edited excerpts:
You have worked in various capacities. Has there been a common thread?
I come from Uganda and I am 55 years old. My life has been varied, involving many jobs, but I have always been impatient with injustice. I grew up in a country that was in a civil conflict for most of my childhood and adolescence. I saw violence and lived as a teenager through the time of a brutal dictator called Idi Amin. I fled and became a refugee. Though I studied engineering, I moved to social and political struggle. But whether in government, women’s organizations, African unions, the UN and now Oxfam, my work has always been about fighting social injustice.
The methods used then and now are completely different though.
Definitely they have been different. For example, at the university I was a refugee student and was resisting Amin’s dictatorship. Our methods then were diplomatic and involved youth mobilization. We would protest before the British government, as I was a refugee in England, against violence and the abuse of human rights by Amin. In government, I was into international diplomacy. In civil society, it involved activism, pushing government, mobilizing women, influencing government and public to change their attitude and behaviour towards women. The methods changed, but the mission and cause remained the same. Right now, we engage corporations and governments. We have methods of engaging the power holders to do right for the poor through an empowerment process.
How do you decide the intervention method?
Poverty is a result of lack of opportunity. Lack of opportunity is about being without power, without being in a position to make choices. We stand with those living in poverty to claim their rights and have the opportunities and choices. We have developed sophisticated ways of “encouraging" governments and corporations to respect the rights and to deliver to the poor. We believe that companies can make profits while lifting millions out of poverty. That profit does not have to be at the cost of the rights of the poor. We also believe that the role of the government is to create a level ground and to empower people to live dignified lives. We challenge governments to put in place policies that give every child, man and woman a fair shot to a good life. That would include good education, good health, access to water and right to food.
How do you engage corporations?
We have two approaches. First, we research and collect information on the damage a company is doing to the people and environment. We ask them to act and if they don’t, we mobilize to pressurize them. Second is the collaborative approach: we select some companies and work with them. We put in place policies in the value chain and monitor regularly. For example, we are working with 10 companies including PepsiCo and Coca-Cola. We assist the sourcing policy of these companies and there are seven indicators which we look at. We score them against rights of women farmers, land grabbing, right to water resources, climate change and others. We are working with chocolate companies such as Mars and Mondelez to respect cocoa farmers and to become champions by respecting their rights by paying fair wages. We are able to collaborate and use tools such as scorecards to encourage companies to be good global citizens.
The Indian government made it stricter for foreign funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to operate which do not have clean books. What is your view?
I cannot comment much on the Indian government. But globally, I can say transparency and credibility of the civil society is important. If the civil society is not transparent, honest and accountable, then you cannot be a champion of social justice. Many international NGOs are part of charters wherein they produce their audited accounts, annual reports and they are scrutinized. At the international level, what we are seeing is that there are small organizations that have policies to challenge the governments and they get a pushback from governments. This is not only in India or developing countries in the south, but also in the north where governments are finding many reasons to control them and reduce their activity and capacity to mobilize. A civil service organization becomes capable of using tools of technology to reach many people at speed and at scale. This is threatening the power of governments. That is why governments raise issues of legitimacy, transparency and accountability. Therefore, the civil society also has to step up. If we are pushing governments to be transparent, we must be transparent as well.
In India we have tried charters similar to INGO Accountability Charter that you head, but they have not worked.
For civil society, peer regulation works the best. If you look at professional organizations of doctors, lawyers or engineers, they do much more to protect citizens and ensure standards. In many countries, professionals are so interested in protecting their trade that they are tough with members who violate laws. I think peer regulation is, if not better, complimentary form of regulation to state regulation. So maybe some have not worked here, but I am sure there will be others that will work.
Oxfam India divides target groups into four categories—Dalits, tribals, Muslims and women. What is the rationale?
We look for the poor and the most marginalized so that the injustice can be addressed and the highest impact for the available resources be delivered. We look through the lens of inequality. I would imagine that these four groups, which include women, face the deepest form of injustice.
How can we address gender inequality given that education levels are low in India?
If you want to really capture women’s empowerment, you need to look into three areas. First is capability—how well women and girls are getting education and nutrition. These are the basic things that you need to have in order to have capacity to do things in life. Second is economic opportunity, which can be measured through participation in labour force and rights in the market. Third is freedom from violence from partners, at workplaces, home and on streets. If in any of these domains you are lagging, you will find your country at the bottom of the Human Development Index rankings.
Drawing from experiences across the world, is there anything specific that India should do?
India is one of the motors of global growth. There is a growing number of middle class in this country. But this growth is leaving many people behind because it seems that the growth is mostly in services. Services sector hires educated people. Millions of Indians, young people without jobs and sustainable livelihoods, are out there in the rural areas. We need to look carefully into our growth models. I think there is something to learn from Brazil, which has not only been able to grow in the past few decades, but has also brought down inequality.
But I am hopeful that Indian innovation can solve it and the fact that it is a democracy itself offers hope that people can organize, think, speak and bring ideas forward, which should stimulate solutions. These are policy choices which can happen in a democracy.
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