Compare And Contrast Oxfam And Blac

The way that development organisations present themselves shows a great deal about the roles and relationships they perceive themselves to play within Development. Specifically these outward communications of themselves showcase their underlying assumptions about Development, their values and beliefs as well as the techniques, methods and approaches that they utilize to implement their ideas. In exploring this argument this essay will focus on two of the larger global Development NGO’s, Oxfam and BRAC. These two organizations have very differing organisational approaches and strategies to development, which will allow for a good comparison on how various ways an organisation can articulate on itself and how that shapes how we see their role
The two different organisations take radically different approaches in their portrayal of themselves in the mainstream media. In both their website design and layout BRAC takes a less graphic approach, instead focusing its attention on providing a wealth of qualitative information including statistics and insights, regarding itself and the various programs and processes that it’s involved in. The BRAC website has approximately 130 pages, mostly focused on their projects and their performances and on their good management practices and accountability even though they are only working in 11 countries at the moment (Srivastava, 2009). The Oxfam website on the other hand in a more graphic intensive website that of focused on functionality and beauty. It is simpler website in terms of information provided and is very much focused on providing a picture of Oxfam projects in the context of news and blogs, as well as showing the global spread of the organisation, while highlighting ‘wow’ factor projects. In fact while there are also upwards of 100 pages on the site, most are dedicated to high-coverage projects, blogging and country profiles. The website’s goals seems to be to focus on the vision and achievements of the
The BRAC report is almost twice in length, at 109 pages while the Oxfam report is shorter at 64 pages. Secondly the Oxfam report spends only 11% (7 pages) of the whole annual report discussing the achievements and performances of its programs, with the remaining pages focusing on discussion of the organization itself, how it supports its programs, its vision and goals, its management structure and accounts and its strategies (Oxfam International, 2013). It focuses more on short-term events or projects and presents more of a narrative of their happenings rather than a more indepth analysis. The BRAC report on the other hand spends 38% of its report on program achievement and performance. At a quantitative level there is also significantly more detail provided in the BRAC report which focuses in on its programs and analyses their global performances, while at the same time also providing historical data to showcase trends and challenges within projects (BRAC, 2013). At the level of statistical data provided the Oxfam report falls far behind that of the BRAC report which is covered with statistics to give context to the scale of work being