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Oxfam GB chief: ‘Doing good can’t be an excuse for tolerating harm’
“The massive defining factor in my life: generally I consider it as guilt,” Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, says. “Typically I consider it as a duty. I simply really feel extremely lucky that my dad and mom had the wherewithal and the chance to go away Sri Lanka once they did and take me with them later.” It allowed them to flee the nation’s devastating civil warfare that started in 1983.
These emotions have pulled Sriskandarajah in the direction of a profession of public service management. He has headed the Royal Commonwealth Society, Civicus, a Johannesburg-based worldwide alliance of civil society organisations, and, since 2019, Oxfam GB, one in every of 21 worldwide Oxfam associates, and the unique Oxfam, based 80 years in the past.
Changing into its chief government was courageous. Oxfam has a proud file, working in catastrophe zones, offering clear water, serving to ladies construct companies. But it surely has spent the previous decade mired in scandal. In 2010, Oxfam officers introduced intercourse employees into their premises in Haiti after a devastating earthquake. The UK Charity Fee mentioned in a 2019 report that Oxfam had “a tradition of tolerating poor behaviour” and had ignored warnings, some from its personal workers.
Sriskandarajah had been wanting ahead to a fellowship on the London Faculty of Economics when the Oxfam put up got here up. Caroline Thomson, then chair of trustees, mentioned Oxfam had chosen him from “a really sturdy brief record” due to “his deep understanding of the challenges going through the sector . . . together with on gender justice”. He put aside any misgivings about taking the job when a former Oxfam board member informed him: “Actual leaders run into the hearth, not away from it.”
Sriskandarajah traces his path to management via the international locations he grew up in. When he was a small youngster, his dad and mom went overseas to do their doctorates, leaving him in Sri Lanka together with his grandparents. By the point they’d completed learning at Sydney college — his father was a vet and animal husbandry knowledgeable, his mom a plant scientist — they’d seen him as soon as between the ages of 1 and 6. “I known as my grandmother ‘mom’ and, in Tamil, I known as my very own mom ‘eldest daughter-in-law’, as a result of that’s how she was referred to within the family I used to be rising up in.”
Within the early Eighties, Asian immigration into Australia was nonetheless tough, so his father obtained an educational put up in Papua New Guinea, the place Sriskandarajah was reunited together with his dad and mom. At his worldwide faculty, his Australian instructor checked out his first title and mentioned, “that’s too tough, mate, I’m going to name you Danny”, which is what folks have known as him ever since.
The household made it to Australia a couple of years later, the place his extremely tutorial New South Wales state faculty noticed management potential. “I wasn’t the neatest. I used to be by no means on the prime of my class.” However he grew to become the college sports activities captain after which captain of the college. “I gravitated to those issues as a result of I felt I may stand out in a reasonably aggressive, however healthily aggressive, pool.” After serving as a pupil consultant at Sydney college, he got here to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1998. Though he has now spent extra time in England than anyplace else, his gratitude to Australia is fierce. If he had stayed in Sri Lanka, he says, his training would have been disrupted by the warfare. As a Tamil he “nearly actually would have had a reasonably horrible life”.
How did he cope with Oxfam’s low morale? “We arrange an e-mail within the three months earlier than I began known as ‘ideas for Danny’. The thought was any workers member throughout the organisation may ship something that they needed me to have a look at and we obtained a couple of hundred responses — and a few fairly confronting messages to me about what wanted fixing within the organisation. That was about actually attempting to get below the pores and skin of what was occurring.” Earlier than arriving, he additionally despatched all workers his software letter to the Oxfam board. In addition to stressing the significance of safeguarding, the letter mentioned Oxfam needed to concentrate on its unique function of coping with the world’s inequalities. “It was reminding colleagues in regards to the larger image, about what we’re right here to do.”
Oxfam was not alone in its second of reckoning. “Haiti was a wake-up name for us, but in addition for the sector,” he says. “Consultants on this space have mentioned, for a few many years a minimum of, that there was one thing mistaken within the worldwide growth sector. That is very a lot one thing we needed to repair in Oxfam, and I hope we’re, however it’s a part of a systemic cultural situation.” There’s an imbalance of energy between NGOs and people they work with. “It’s akin to different types of programs or buildings the place that abuse of energy can occur: healthcare or kids’s providers. However the sector hadn’t approached this set of points in the identical approach that kids’s providers or healthcare has needed to.”
Following its vital 2019 report, the Charity Fee final 12 months recommended Oxfam for enhancements, some launched earlier than Sriskandarajah’s arrival, in its recruitment, coaching and understanding of what prevented folks from reporting harassment. The Fee famous Oxfam had additionally elevated the proportion of ladies leaders from 25 per cent to 50 per cent. “And that’s essential as a result of, like most charities, we’re feminine majority within the workers, however we had a kind of glass pyramid as a result of we tended to be extra male majority within the senior management,” Sriskandarajah says.
Three questions for Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah
Who’s your management hero?
Mary Robinson [former president of Ireland]. A tremendous political chief, head of state however, for me, a values-based chief of the very best type — on human rights, on local weather justice, when she chairs the Elders [an independent group of global leaders]. Principled, courageous. After which, the icing on the cake, I final noticed her at COP in Glasgow, she’s simply so heat, she all the time asks after your loved ones.
If you happen to weren’t a CEO/chief what would you be?
I might like to have been a journey author. I’ve now lived in six international locations on 4 continents, I’ve been to greater than 100 international locations, seen the world and had alternatives that might have been unimaginable to somebody like me even a couple of many years in the past.
What was the primary management lesson you learnt?
After I obtained the Rhodes scholarship, I had seven or eight months earlier than beginning at Oxford. I obtained a job at a newly created analysis institute at Sydney college taking a look at well being ethics, led by an eminent professor, a surgeon. Each Friday morning, he’d insist that everybody flip up, we’d have espresso for an hour or two, no agenda, and we’d all take turns to lift a difficulty. That to me is the concept of a pacesetter who’s approachable, caring and inclusive, and championing and empowering others round them.
So it got here as a blow when, in April final 12 months, new allegations emerged about Oxfam staff within the Democratic Republic of Congo. In June, Oxfam introduced it had dismissed 4 workers members for nepotism, sexual misconduct and bullying. “We had an ongoing exterior investigation that we commissioned six months earlier than the information reviews have been popping out,” Sriskandarajah says. What’s essential, he provides, is that Oxfam is now clear about the place abuses are nonetheless going down and has programs to cope with them.
Whereas Oxfam was cleansing itself up, Covid struck. The pandemic vastly elevated the quantity of people that wanted assist. “The World Financial institution estimates 160mn folks a minimum of will have already got been pushed into $5.50-a-day poverty,” Sriskandarajah says. Oxfam needed to shut its community of about 600 UK retailers for seven months, placing workers on furlough. Its revenue from authorities and public authority grants and donations helped to restrict the autumn in whole revenue to £344.3mn in 2020-21 from £376.4mn the 12 months earlier than.
The warfare in Ukraine, which started after this interview was performed, presents the world’s poor with new issues. Whereas Oxfam works on the Ukraine disaster with different organisations within the Disasters Emergency Committee, Sriskandarajah emails: “We’re additionally acutely aware of how wider impacts equivalent to rising meals costs may hurt weak folks all over the world — thousands and thousands of individuals within the Horn of Africa are already going through excessive starvation as a consequence of local weather change, battle and the pandemic.”
Oxfam is forming deeper partnerships in fewer international locations, working more and more via native companions. Doesn’t this outsourcing enhance Oxfam’s reputational danger? Sriskandarajah concedes that outsourcing achieved badly can injury the outsourcer, however he says it is important to construct native organisations. “It’s been too lengthy that the worldwide growth sector has mentioned ‘we’re going to fly in and do a great job’.” And Oxfam wants to make sure that its personal workers abide by its guidelines. “Simply since you are doing good can’t be an excuse for tolerating hurt,” he says.