As the Chief Executive of Oxfam GB, Mark Goldring brings the needs of the world’s poorest people to a global stage – working with high-level government and business leaders and influencing them to act decisively against the causes of poverty. Goldring also manages Oxfam’s programmes in 55 countries. Under his leadership, the international NGO reached more than 13 million people directly last year, which involved responding to emergencies, developing long-term projects and campaigning for lasting change.

Goldring has decades of experience in international development. He was formerly the Chief Executive of VSO and has worked in the field for the UNDP, and DFID. He read law at Oxford and has a Masters in social policy and planning in developing countries from the London School of Economics. His considerable services to tackling poverty and disadvantage were recognised in 2008 with a CBE.

 In this interview with BR Research, Mark talks about global developmental agenda and how Oxfam is dealing with some of those problems.

BR Research: Which thematic areas has Oxfam been focusing on globally?

 Mark Goldring: Globally, the ‘Big Development’ is celebrating the success of the world’s progress in ending poverty but recognizing we can’t compete with that, unless we tackle women’s rights and women’s equality, climate change and its impact on poor people’s lives, because they are being affected more than the rich, and growing inequality within countries.

We want to celebrate what business, investments and trade can do to improve economic opportunities. We also want to see that the opportunity and the wealth it creates are managed in a way that really benefits the poor. So Oxfam is trying to concentrate on taxation. Multinationals companies are moving money to places with the least tax, which is depriving many countries that generate natural resources out of any real share of profits. We are also looking at domestic taxation, that relation between direct and indirect taxes, where the rich manage to avoid direct taxes. It was Warren Buffet who said that, he was rather surprised as the world’s richest man that his secretary paid tax at a rate higher than he did.

We are also looking at public spending on health, education, agriculture, and social security; they disproportionately benefit the poor people. The more we can invest in them, the more we can give everybody an equal chance in life.

And then the third area is working wages, being very conscious that unless we work hard, technology will actually reduce the number of jobs for poor people. It will increase the wealth for the people who own the technology and decrease it for the poor. Now, we cannot turn our back on technology. But we can look at how do we tax it, and what do we do about minimum wages. Then, of course, in many countries, especially countries like Pakistan, huge number of people are not working in the formal sector; therefore, simply legislating for a minimum wage is not enough.

BRR: “Let’s leave no one behind”; what does that mean for Oxfam? 

MG: The various dimensions of inequality demands that economic development must work for the poorest; “let’s leave no one behind”, is really the central part of our organization. Just to be clear, Oxfam’s interest is in the relation between inequality and ending poverty. We will always have inequality. We are not saying that everybody must have the same. What we are saying is that the rich are capturing more of the benefits of the progress than the poor. This means that many of the poor are left behind and many of them won’t end poverty as quickly as they could do.

BRR: Developmental agencies are known for high administration costs that leave little for actual spending on the ground.  What kinds of checks and balances do you have?

MG: We have everything from audits to regular visits to beneficiary assessments. We ourselves as Oxfam publish our management overheads on our website. People can see everything – even my salary. They can see that Oxfam spends an average of 82 cents on every dollar directly on our programs and 18 cents go in fundraising and management, and then they can see what we spend it on.

BRR: Some INGOs are facing difficulties due to the recent regulatory changes for INGOs in Pakistan. How is Oxfam dealing with that? 

MG: The regulations are very strict for international NGOs. They literally have been inspecting our bank statements, which makes it difficult to run day to day operations. Just to use a recent example: we are working with others to develop a big program to support women’s rights organizations. One of the challenges we deal with is that we will only be allowed to transfer funds to some of the organizations because the others don’t have the right form of registration, even though they are doing good work.

This makes it very hard to support the grassroots groups who are informal. Therefore, that framework on the international NGOs is very tight. It limits your flexibility. We have pointed it out to the Secretary of Interior that sometimes there was urgent work and we simply couldn’t start it because we haven’t gotten the clearances.

BRR: The trouble with grassroots development organizations in Pakistan is that they too – much like most companies and chamber or associations – remain a family concern. In fact, they act like a business unit, and keep the benefits flowing from INGOs into their clique of family and friends. How do you deal with that?

MG: It is an absolutely fair argument, and the very damaging thing is that international organizations start putting large sums of money. Because not only do you risk playing to the ones that are articulate, and can write proposals; but you also often create friction with large amounts of money with organizations that had genuinely been working with their own efforts before. Handling that with care has got to be fundamental.

I spent many years working in South Asia with local NGOs, and there were some of them who could basically sit outside your office with a computer, and write the proposal according to what they think you will support as the fashion of the moment. They are the ones you are talking about. So we need to start dealing with it; it doesn’t mean we will always get it right. However, I have also seen many grassroots organizations that have done good work.

BRR: A lot of inequality breeds from information asymmetry, and poor people’s access to, and ability to, understand economic, political and legal rights as against the ability of the rich. Do you think special focus needs to be given by organizations such as Oxfam to sort of remove or reduce that gap?

MG: I do. If you look at some of the modern challenges, they are very different to the ones that the development agencies are geared up to work on. Development agencies, whether international or national, traditionally worked on rural development, agricultural opportunities – you know those kinds of things, health and housing etc. So firstly, we have to get better working in cities. Secondly, we have got to recognize that some of the health challenges are very different. Obesity in many countries is a bigger challenge than malnutrition. Road accidents are a bigger killer than many of the child diseases.

Many of my colleagues say that if we were to restate human rights, accessed information needs to be given far greater attention. So we are trying to work on that. I can’t pretend that Oxfam is ahead of this, but we are trying to recognize it.

For example, we have programs in Rwanda and other countries where we are trying to promote access to legal rights through a combination of traditional media and new media. We have a situation there where many people don’t understand their legal rights.

We can’t get a lawyer to everybody. But we are using public-service broadcasts that people traditionally listen to try to drive them to unlined resources. So you are completely right to challenge that the world of development has not caught up with this need as yet. But Oxfam is aware of it, and we are trying to work on it, though not well enough yet.

BRR: What political incentives do the elite - be it intellectual, financial, industrial, political, or feudal elite - have to reduce poverty or inequality?

MG: You are right that inequality isn’t just about economic inequality. If you have more money you are likely to stay on path, and if you have more money you are likely to be a successful lobbyist for your company or industry than others are. The more unequal we become, the more power gets polarized. And you can see that in the USA very strongly. What are the drivers to fix it? The drivers have to be public action. And in most cases, that means using the ballot box. And it is not just at the time of the election, but about the public opinion, more in general.

BRR: Do you think social media is also ‘Manufacturing Consent’?

MG: It can be, and a lot of it is very superficial, in terms of the real feelings of the people. So, if you respond to every up and down, you miss the point. We can’t use it as a real health check for an underlying issue.

BRR: In terms of climate change, where does your bias lie? There is a growing body of scholars that say, well, we have got to do away with this obsession of generating wealth and concentrate on how we can reconcile the distribution and de-growth.

MG: In many of the places where Oxfam works, there simply isn’t enough wealth for everybody to live a comfortable life. So we can’t say ‘you should stay poor for the sake of the planet’.

We have to look at inequality because if we were to distribute a significant amount of those extremes of wealth, there will be a lot more to go around. We also have to use more climate-sensitive technology in everything we do.

So we can’t trade-off poverty against the environment, but we can actually trade-off how we create wealth against the environment. And at the moment, we are not doing very well; we are in fact getting it backwards in the USA. I don’t think we can say we have reached the place where we can impose a limit on growth.

There simply is not enough wealth being created everywhere in the world. But in a sense the job of the richer countries is firstly to get their own houses in order where the limits to growth are much more fundamental. Secondly, they need to support the developing countries to get this happening the right way.

BRR: This effectively means that a lot of Oxfam and other development agencies work should be focused towards changing public mindsets and creating political pressures in rich countries to fix global inequality and address climate change concerns. 

MG: Yes. And that is why I say that the inequality agenda is just as much about energy and climate change as it is about money.

BRR: But when we read about inequality in Oxfam’s published studies, we don’t see adequate focus on climate change in those studies. It is mostly income equality or gender.

MG: You are right. Certainly, we have been very behind. But the next iteration on our work on inequality will be bringing this war in.