Oxfam's Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods (EFSL) work
Oxfam's EFSL specialists aim to provide sector leadership in appropriate and proportionate responses to food and livelihoods crises.
How we work
Oxfam's EFSL professionals are a group of technical specialists with common principles, objectives, approaches and experiences who are able to learn from, and support, each other, and thereby maximise our impact on malnutrition, food insecurity and livelihoods in emergencies around the world.
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 and always advocate that this is done by specialist nutrition INGOs.
What the team does
Direct implementation
Emergency Food Security and Livelihood Assessments are key to understanding how people construct their livelihoods in a particular context. With this understanding the team can design responses that are appropriate and proportional to needs. The key challenge is to do this in a way that strengthens people’s natural capacity to cope with their situation and doesn’t impose ill informed external solutions. The team place great emphasis on promoting the full participation of the people involved – empowering communities/individuals by providing them with the ability to regain/rebuild their livelihoods. This particularly means working with women and groups not typically represented.
The team ensures that the interventions go to the right people/groups, and are appropriate in terms of type and timing. They may be food based but can call on a variety of interventions e.g social safety nets, market and cash interventions.
Strategy and advocacy
The team is heavily involved with the planning, monitoring and implementation of programmes at programme/field level, however the team also benefits from Oxfam’s expertise with their media and advocacy teams. This gives our EFSL specialists the opportunity to use their skills and knowledge to feed into strategy and advocacy work to influence the various aid actors; NGOs, UN agencies, governments and donors. This may be strategic advocacy at the country level around location and type of intervention or it may be high-level strategic advocacy to key stakeholders. A good example of this is the team’s current work on, cash and market interventions that is increasingly being adopted across the aid sector.
Current EFSL work
For many years Oxfam has been constructively critical of food aid coming from wealthy donor countries. It can have harmful effects by undermining local production and trade and therefore the livelihoods of poor people themselves. Food aid, sometimes sends prices down and hurts farmers and local traders. Consequently, Oxfam is pioneering the use of “cash transfers” in emergency situations. Where there is food available locally but people can’t afford it, Oxfam advocates the provision of cash aid instead of food. It’s both quicker and cheaper, because food doesn’t need to be shipped over large distances before being distributed. Also Oxfam is a lead agency in the piloting of an approach to determine how agencies can best support local markets and livelihoods. This cutting edge work is changing the way in which the humanitarian system is responding to food crises.
History of EFSL work in Oxfam
Oxfam GB’s food and nutrition approach has been at the forefront of humanitarian food and livelihood work and EFSL specialists have been heavily involved in the development of techniques and approaches that are widely used today. In particular Oxfam was one of the first agencies to highlight the potentially harmful effects of international food aid in some situations, as far back as 1982 with the publication of Against the Grain: The Dilemma of Project Food Aid. This ability to challenge the status quo and move things forward continues today and Oxfam is still at the cutting edge of humanitarian thinking with the development of cash transfer and market based approaches that aim to save lives AND save livelihoods.
Current scope of Oxfam's EFSL work
Emergency Food Security and Livelihoods 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.
