I thank the sub-committee for the opportunity to address it, today. I am the chief executive of Oxfam Ireland. I want to talk briefly about Oxfam, in case anybody is not fully aware of what we do. Then I shall give some examples of how the Irish aid programme has directly assisted what we are doing and demonstrate how any reduction in that will devastate our efforts.
Fundamentally, we believe that we collectively have the power to end poverty and injustice. Just as with apartheid and slavery, we need the commitment and the willingness to do it.
Oxfam has been in Ireland in one shape or another for about 40 years. We are an independent Irish NGO working on an all-island basis, with more than 100,000 active supporters, including donors, volunteers and thousands of campaigners throughout Ireland, in every village, town and city. They range from passionate young campaigners to retired old people who volunteer in our shops and who support the work we do. We are an independent organisation, but we are also part of the Oxfam International confederation, of which I sit on the board. We work collectively in more than 100 countries, so we have a global reach. We are part of a global movement for change. The honorary president of Oxfam International is Mrs. Mary Robinson.
We work in three main ways. We provide humanitarian work in sudden onset and long-term emergencies such as in the DRC, northern Uganda and Darfur. We do long-term livelihood work and HIV/AIDS work in Tanzania, Malawi, rural South Africa and other countries. We also work in campaigning and advocacy for the issues that affect people in the developing world, such as debt relief and climate change, and we highlight the effects of the current food price crisis and the global financial crisis.
One of our successes has been to begin the fair trade movement in Ireland, and this has now gone mainstream. A few weeks ago, Cadbury announced that all its dairy milk bars would now be made with fair trade sourced cocoa from Ghana. Tens of thousands of farmers will benefit from this. GlaxoSmithKline announced recently that all drugs it provides to the 52 poorest countries will be reduced in price. These are examples of the power of campaigning and the effectiveness of advocacy.
I could provide many examples and statistics about the effectiveness of the aid that Irish Aid provides to us and our colleagues. We work in a district in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We work through partners to provide clean water and good sanitation facilities for communities along the shores of Lake Albert. Before we arrived, the area had no clean water sources and no sanitation facilities. There were thousands of cases of cholera each year. Due to the provision of clean water and education, the incidence of this disease has been reduced to fewer than ten cases in 2007. That is a direct result of the funding received from Irish Aid. We provided new bore-holes, repaired existing water supplies, paid for public health promoters and provided emergency stock in the instances where cholera broke out.
The funding we received for that programme has since been eliminated. It is gone. There are 182,000 people who will no longer have secure access to clean water, and they will not have the capacity to respond to outbreaks of cholera that may arise. Prior to that, we were the main source of contact for that community to alert the international community and to instigate work on that. There are other programmes, such as protection programming, which will now be gone and may result in an increase in attacks on locals, particularly women and girls gathering wood and water and who will have to go further than they used to go to obtain clean water sources. If we stop funding this programme, people will die. It is as simple as that.
In the past 24 hours there has been escalation of the conflict in the DRC. Members may be aware that the conflict there has claimed approximately 5.4 million lives in the past ten years. It is the worst conflict since World War Two and we have been working there for a long time, as have several of our partners. As a direct result of the cutbacks, we have had to dip into the emergency fund we would normally put aside for this kind of relief that is required by the 220,000 additional displaced people. We must spend it now on the water and sanitation projects I mentioned. I will travel there next week to assess the situation, but it looks pretty dire from where we stand now. It is much the same in southern Sudan, where I lived and worked a few years ago.
We support many local partners globally, one of which is AFRIWAG in Tanzania. We have been working with this organisation since 2004, providing various vital supply services to orphans and other children made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS. If the Irish Aid fund to Oxfam Ireland drops, we will have to reduce that dramatically. At the moment we are working with 16,000 orphans in primary schools who receive scholastic support, 2,000 orphans who receive medication, 250 secondary school students, 45 households who need essential food items, 150 households caring for orphans who receive social support, and 2,000 children made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS. These are just some examples of real life situations.
I will finish up by telling members about a very impressive lady called Nganashe Lembris, who lives in Tanzania. She has been supported by one of our local partners in that country. She was not allowed to go to school, as she was a girl, so she started capacity building through this programme that we support. The following is her narrative.
I was offered land under customary arrangements, and I use it for farming and keeping animals. I divide the crops I get from this farm into two halves; one half for commercial purposes and the other half as food security for my family. My participation in the course was an eye opener. I learned about land tenure, small business and the benefits of having a certificate of occupancy of land.
I was asked to participate in the village assembly where I was elected to become a community animator for the village. The training has been very useful. I have, for example, managed to improve my agricultural practices by using manure and improved seeds. In the last harvest, I managed to raise production to 12 sacks of maize, from only four in the previous year.
That is a dramatic result from the work being done. She saved the sum of money, she bought heifers and sold them, and invested that money in building her business. Ultimately, her ambition is to send her children to school.
People like Nganashe are real people. These are not statistics or numbers being fired around. They are people like you and me who find themselves in difficult circumstances. They want to raise their families in hope and dignity. They do not want our charity, but they need our ongoing commitment to help them get out of the devastating cocktail of disasters that have been mentioned, disasters that they did not create, but which have combined to put their lives and the lives of their families in the most precarious position.
We appreciate the major challenges that committee members and their colleagues are facing at this time, but we implore them to use their influence to ensure that the overseas development budget, on which the lives of the people I have discussed depend, is not cut even further. These people are already suffering the most as a consequence of the global economic crisis. I ask committee members to please ensure that they do not suffer any more.