Guest post from Matthew Spencer, Oxfam’s Director of Campaigns, Policy and Influencing (@spencerthink)  Judith Amoit, a 27 year-old policewoman hit the Kenyan news last year when she lost her twins shortly after giving birth prematurely in the Nairobi West hospital. She was prevented from leaving the hospital to bury her children because she couldn’t pay the £20,000 bill.  Judith was

Max Lawson is back again (he seems to have more time to write now he’s Oxfam International’s policy guy on inequality) to discuss tax morality and a bizarre encounter with a Buddhist accountant A few years ago I went on a hiking holiday with a number of people I didn’t know, and ended up befriending a tax accountant.  He was a very

A second post on corruption ahead of tomorrow’s summit. Activists are often more concerned with how they see the world than with understanding how others see it, but understanding what motivates and incentivises others is crucial to building coalitions for change. Transparency campaigner David McNair describes one such example, a wonky-but-important demand for a Global Beneficial Ownership Register to curb

Scandals like the Panama Papers are a massive potential driver of policy change. In normal times, the sources of inertia are great and politicians wishing to make change happen face an array of vested interests and fixed ideas telling them what they want is either insane or impossible. It takes a scandal to shake things up, delegitimize the status quo,

This guest post comes from Mathieu Vervynckt, Policy & Research Analyst with the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) The Third UN Conference on Financing for Development(FfD), set to take place in Addis Ababa next year, will be a crucial opportunity to discuss two of the hottest topics in development finance today: the use of scarce public resources to

The rhythm of NGO advocacy and campaigning sometimes makes it particularly hard to work on complicated issues, involving drawn-out negotiations where bad guys have more resources and staying power than we do. Campaigns on trade, climate change, debt relief etc often follow a similar trajectory – a big NGO splash as a new issue breaks, then activists realize they need

One of the G20 Voice bloggers at the London Summit last week was a rather distinguished-looking, silver haired Chilean who turned out to be Daniel Kaufman. He used to work at the World Bank, where he was one of the 46 employees who blew the whistle on Paul Wolfowitz in a letter to Wolfowitz and the bank’s board that argued

Now the dust has settled, we’ve caught up on lost sleep, and recovered from that slight hint of Stockholm Syndrome created by the collective hysteria of a summit, it’s time to stand back and think about what happens next. As part of that exercise, here are the forward-looking processes that the G20 put in place to review, monitor, propose further

The big day dawns in a fog of confusion and press reports of rifts between continental Europe and the Anglo Saxons, following what were portrayed as rival press conferences by Obama and Brown in one part of London, and Sarkozy and Merkel in another. Today will show how much of this was just playing to the domestic gallery – Sarkozy

The FT has got its hands on a leaked copy, as has der Spiegel (a different draft, it seems, but I can’t find that one on the net). The FT version is nice and short (24 paras). Here’s what it says on Oxfam’s main asks for the summit, namely: