Sexual exploitation in DR Congo: UK suspends help funding to Oxfam

Two employees from the International NGO collective Oxfam had been suspended final week within the wake of sexual exploitation allegations in opposition to them. Now the UK authorities has suspended Oxfam from receiving any monetary help. These two employees had been working within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
This comes simply after Oxfam turned eligible once more to use for help funds from the UK authorities in March. The NGO was banned for 3 years from receiving help funding from the UK due to Oxfam’s cover-up of sexual exploitation coming to mild in 2018.
UK’s Foreign and Development Office clarified that Oxfam won’t be able to use for UK help cash till it clears up these recent allegations.
“All organizations bidding for UK aid must meet the high standards of safeguarding required to keep the people they work with safe,” the Foreign Office’s spokesperson mentioned.
Recent reviews “call into question” Oxfam’s skill to satisfy these excessive requirements, he added.
Oxfam, then again, tried the suspensions as optimistic, saying that suspensions present “our commitment to tackle abuses of power”.
Oxfam employees’s sexual exploitation in Haiti
In 2018, the uncovering of Oxfam employees’s sexual exploitation in Haiti, whereby the Haiti Oxfam chief solicited prostitutes in a villa which was paid and supplied for by Oxfam, had uncovered the darkish underbelly of worldwide charity organizations and NGOs on the whole.
Many guarantees of reform and alter had been made within the wake of the 2018 scandal, however these newest allegations popping out from the DRC clearly pose new questions on whether or not sufficient change has been made.
According to the UK Foreign Office, Oxfam is but to satisfy the best requirements of safekeeping. After three years of being banned from receiving funds and simply changing into eligible once more, Oxfam is now as soon as once more shunned by the UK authorities.
In the wake of all these allegations, together with the fallout from the 2018 scandal, Oxfam’s popularity has suffered an nearly irrecoverable blow.
Charges of sexual exploitation in DR Congo
Last week, Oxfam revealed that it had suspended two of its employees within the Democratic Republic of Congo as a part of an “external investigation” into the allegations. However, in response to The Times, whistleblowers had been “frustrated at the length of time taken to complete the investigation”
Former and present employees members of Oxfam made allegations of sexual exploitation, bullying, fraud, and nepotism in opposition to 11 folks in a letter despatched to the Oxfam management in February, the paper mentioned.
After Oxfam’s Haiti sexual exploitation scandal got here to mild in 2018, the UK Charity Commission concluded that Oxfam had a “culture of poor behavior” and was issued with a warning over its “mismanagement”. In the wake of this scandal, hundreds of individuals canceled their common donations to Oxfam, inflicting Oxfam to make cuts value 16 million British kilos.
It is to be famous that the CEO of Oxfam India, Amitabh Behar, wrote a fawning article on the Congress get together. In the article, Behar gives quite a few sermons to the Congress get together and eulogizes its thought of India. Furthermore, a Board Member of Oxfam India was concerned within the drafting of the deeply harmful and anti-Hindu Communal Violence Bill.