A corporate partnership with Oxfam is a mutually beneficial relationship. For Oxfam it means greater access to innovative ideas, skills and expertise, scale, and funding support. For our corporate partners, it means the chance to make a positive social impact, build relationships with local civil society organizations, and develop and deploy ethical and sustainable business strategies.
Why work with Oxfam
- Collaborate with our global network of subject matter experts: We hold deep expertise in a range of poverty and development issues, including agriculture, supply chains, climate change, disaster risk reduction, gender, transparency, citizen activism, and labor and human rights.
- Within each of these areas, Oxfam seeks to empower relevant stakeholders, such as local communities and the workforce, farmer organizations, and local civil society groups, to strengthen industry practices and co-create new business models and transform existing ones. Our partnerships aim to strengthen company strategies and practices around sustainability, responsible sourcing, women’s economic empowerment and human rights.
- Co-design innovative and unique partnerships: Our teams will work with you to develop transformative partnerships that are aligned with our shared values, your business goals, and the needs of marginalized and vulnerable communities to create the greatest positive impact. Our decades of experience with research, programming, advocacy, and campaigning on poverty alleviation strategies allows us to engage in groundbreaking work to create lasting change.
Ways to partner
- Strategic partnerships. Work with Oxfam to develop and deploy sustainable business strategies on women’s economic empowerment, livelihoods, sustainable supply chains, labor, human rights, humanitarian response, disaster risk reduction, and environmental impact. We can accomplish this work through programmatic partnerships and with the aid of our private sector team.
- Employee engagement and giving. Become an Oxfam champion at your company and plan an Oxfam event—such as an interactive Hunger Banquet—for your colleagues to learn about global poverty and solutions to end it. Oxfam can provide experiences and activities to motivate and energize employees and bring your workforce together around a common cause.
- Emergency support partnerships. Be known as the company that steps up when a humanitarian disaster strikes, and support Oxfam’s disaster relief work around the world.
- Corporate donations. Make a contribution to our fight against poverty by providing financial, technical, or in-kind support.
- Customer engagement. Partner with Oxfam to engage with new and existing customers, influence consumer behavior, strengthen local markets, access local talent, and grow your brand.
Our partnerships are making a crucial difference:
Since 2011, the ADP Foundation has supported the full range of Oxfam’s work to end the injustice of poverty in over 90 countries around the world. This partnership allows Oxfam to work with local partners to tackle the root causes of poverty and create lasting solutions in communities worldwide. The ADP Foundation’s support also enables Oxfam to provide lifesaving and immediate humanitarian assistance to populations affected by natural and man-made disasters in vulnerable communities.
Oxfam receives generous employee giving and related corporate matching from the Cisco Foundation for humanitarian emergencies. In 2019, Cisco launched an employee giving and match campaign for Oxfam’s response to Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. The previous year, Cisco supported Oxfam’s efforts to respond to the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, and to flooding in Kerala, India. In 2013, Cisco supported Oxfam’s Saving for Change program in Senegal through a technology grant.
Oxfam and Equal Exchange have a decades-long partnership focused on improving the global food system and supporting small-scale producers and food workers. We have recently collaborated on creating educational supporter events and mobilization opportunities, and we have participated in one another’s annual supporter summits. Equal Exchange also contributes to Oxfam’s programs and advocacy work around the world.
In 2018, Facebook generously supported Oxfam’s response to poor farmers affected by Typhoon Mangkhut and Typhoon Yutu in the Philippines. Facebook’s partnership helped farmers and their families meet basic needs for food, water, hygiene, and medicine through multi-purpose cash grants. These grants were directly loaded onto families’ prepaid Visa cards through electronic disbursements.
Oxfam has received pro bono services to revamp aspects of our Community Based Human Rights Impact Assessment initiative and related Getting it Right tool. The Getting it Right tool is a dynamic participatory approach for analyzing the human rights impacts of private and public foreign investments. It enables communities and the organizations that support them to identify human rights impacts, propose responses, and engage government and corporate actors to take action to respect human rights.
As part of Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign, Oxfam challenged Mars to make strong commitments to empower women in the company’s cocoa supply chains, which it did. Oxfam and Mars share the belief that farmers need an income that provides a decent standard of living. Together, we’re working to improve the income of smallholder farmers in the Mars supply chain and challenge other industry actors to do the same. Oxfam also is advising Mars on how to best address the unique barriers women face in their supply chains in order to implement the commitments they made under the Behind the Brands initiative.
Oxfam receives generous support from Microsoft’s workplace giving opportunities and related corporate match for humanitarian emergencies and much-needed general operating support. Our partnership includes working with Microsoft Philanthropies’ Technology for Social Impact team, which puts Oxfam’s responsible data policy into practice through technologies that are safe, and that embed best practice behaviors.
Oxfam, Unilever, and Unilever’s laundry brand, Surf, partnered in 2016 to address the challenges and impact of unpaid care work. The three-year Women’s Empowerment & Care (WE-Care) partnership aims to recognize, reduce, and redistribute the amount of time women and girls in the Philippines and Zimbabwe spend on unpaid care work. The partnership includes funding to improve access to water and sanitation infrastructure to help reduce time spent on household chores. The program also leverages the power of advertising through a commercial “I Laba Yu,” which aims to shift social norms on care work. This partnership has positively impacted the lives of over 70,000 women and girls in Zimbabwe and the Philippines, driven policy change to make more equal the caring responsibilities of women and men, and reached millions of people through media campaigns to promote this more equitable sharing of work.
