Azerbaijan
In Azerbaijan, Oxfam's focus is on health care, supporting people's livelihoods, and improving government transparency.
Adjusting to peace
Azerbaijan suffered a humanitarian crisis in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed and conflict erupted with its neighbour Armenia.
- 16 per cent of Azerbaijan's territory was lost in the war
- 600,000 people were forced to leave their homes
Today, thousands are still displaced or living in extreme poverty. Rich in natural oil reserves, the challenge for Azerbaijan is to use its potential wealth to build a prosperous and fair country, free from poverty and corruption.
How Oxfam is helping
We are working with the government to improve transparency and help keep local institutions accountable to their citizens.
Before, people thought of the municipality and its staff only as tax-collectors, but your project helped us to build a positive image of the local authority.
Javid Abdullayev, Khanarab Municipality
Access to markets
In south-central Azerbaijan, thousands of farmers depend on agriculture for their living. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the privatisation of collective farms in the mid 90s, many farmers are still struggling to make ends meet.
Difficulty in accessing national markets, due in part to limited storage and transportation, means little choice but to sell their produce to middlemen who purchase goods below actual market price. A lack of capacity and the imbalance of international markets also makes it difficult to secure a sustainable future. For many smallholder farmers addressing these issues and enabling better access to local, national and international markets will help secure a decent livelihood and a better future.
![[Photo credit: Jennifery Abrahamson]](images/azerbaijan_onions.jpg)
I mainly grow onions – it’s my only source of income but we cannot sell the products we’ve grown. We would like to have alternative markets, where we can sell our output at normal market prices.
Solmaz Aliyeva, small holder farmer in Khanereb village
How Oxfam is helping
In the highly fertile and once prosperous agricultural regions of Azerbaijan, Oxfam is working to give smallholder farmers, especially women, sustainable solutions to overcome poverty.
Together with significant funding from the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC) and in partnership with Unilever, a global multinational company, we are helping farmers to form co-operatives and improve their income through technical support and training on production, processing, and marketing. In the long term, smallholder farmers will have better access to local, regional and global markets. Oxfam’s work will benefit 60,000 smallholder farmers and enable them to earn a decent living from their products.
Other development work
- Improving availability of basic health care
- Helping people displaced by conflict to rebuild their lives
- Working with communities to be better prepared for natural disasters
