“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Vision
Our vision is for men and women living in poverty and exclusion to be able to organise, strategise and act to assert their human rights.
Mission
Equalinrights’ mission is to advance understanding and use of bottom-up human-rights based strategies in the global struggle against poverty, gender inequality, marginalization and exclusion.
To support these efforts, Equalinrights offers face-to-face and interactive online platforms for practitioners to connect and share with others their skills, knowledge and experience about bottom-up human rights-based development.
Strategic Orientation
Equalinrights operates as a support structure and knowledge platform working in cooperation with organisations and partners on a shared mission on a particular theme, disseminating lessons from practice and building capacity to implement human rights-based development practice. To this end, Equalinrights deploys three main operational strategies to realize its mission:
- Strengthening human rights-based development practice
- Innovating aspects of human rights-based development practice
- Linking and building strategic alliances with Civil Society Organisations.
The first strategy relates to getting the practice into the hands of the development practitioners. Towards this end, Equalinrights develops programmes to suit an organisation and context building their capacity by providing the theory and practical steps to integrate human rights-based development practice into existing programmes. It supports the development of practice into usable materials to promote learning as well as stimulating and nurturing relationships between practitioners for mutual sharing, learning and reflecting on knowledge, skills and experience.
The focus of the second strategy is on innovation and working in partnership with like-minded organisations to nurture new methods derived from bottom-up people-centred practice. It is aimed at promoting local, community-based efforts geared towards improving the realisation of ESC rights as well as documenting and disseminating good human rights-based development practice in the form of case studies, critical stories of change, methodologies, advocacy tools, etc.
The third strategy allows Equalinrights to position itself within the human rights and development community with the aim of contributing to, learning from and collaborating with other Civil Society, lobby and advocacy initiatives that promote ESC rights and support the advancement of human rights-based development.
Equalinrights adopts all three strategies into its various initiatives resulting in commonalities cutting across all of our projects.
Equalinrights and Human Rights-Based Development (HRBD)
Equalinrights strives to bridge the gap between the development and human rights fields, and to provide support to the integration of bottom-up approaches in human rights-based development practice. The rationale for focusing on ‘bottom-up’ practice is to promote people-centred methods and techniques that address human rights deficiencies, alongside the more familiar and well-used legal means of only addressing the international and regional treaty reporting bodies. Bottom-up practice is practice derived from people’s actions to realize their rights. Advocacy, tackling inequality in service provision, policy-influencing, citizen charters, right-based data collection, monitoring increases in budget allocations to implement a right, raising awareness of entitlements are all examples of bottom-up development practice, and those cases where actions centre on a right are what we term bottom-up human rights-based development practice. We also recognize that human rights-based development has strong parallels with the gender equality disciplines and see them as combined, complementary and mutually reinforcing.
