Equalinfo Newsletter
Equalinfo is Equalinrights' monthly newsletter on human rights-based development and contains updated information on Equalinrights' activities, developments in the field of rights-based approaches in different parts in the world, recent publications on human rights-based strategies, and upcoming events on human rights and development related issues. If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter, just drop us an email with 'Equalinfo' in the 'subject' line.
Current Issue: January-February 2010 [Downloadable version]
Equalinfo Issue January-February 2010
In this issue
1. What’s happening in the Budgeting Human Rights Project?
2. PhD Students discuss frontloading human rights
3. Gender Responsive Budgeting in Morocco
4. Transformative Learning for Human Rights (TLHR) – from the field
5. WRR Report: Less Pretension, More Ambition
6. Announcements
7. Forthcoming Events
8. Resources
9. Staff News
1. What’s happening in the Budgeting Human Rights Project?
- John Nakuta
In the last issue of Equalinfo, we proudly announced the birth of the Global Initiative on Frontloading and Costing Human Rights or GIF. Equalinrights was tasked with the duty of hosting the GIF secretariat. A new Project Officer has been recruited to take on this vital and exciting role. Her name is Zairah Khan and she commences her contract with Equalinrights on 22nd March 2010 – see more on Zairah in Staff News.
One of the objectives set for GIF last November was the development of the conceptual thinking and practice of frontloading - pinning down exactly what we mean by frontloading. John Nakuta, Head of the Law Department at the University of Namibia, Windhoek, has been located at Equalinrights’ offices since the beginning of January working on a framework to describe frontloading. His work is at inception stage and he is drawing on other members of GIF for theoretical and practical support. He hopes to have a working draft of the framework to share by the time he heads back south to Windhoek at the beginning of March.
As mentioned in the last edition of Equalinfo, the report from the Workshop on Frontloading and Costing Human Rights is now available.
With agreement being reached on the recently drafted Terms of Reference governing the Initiative, GIF is now officially open to new members. Please contact: Zairah Khan or Cornelieke Keizer
2. Ph.D. students discuss frontloading human rights
Doctoral students of Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) of The Utrecht School of Law attended a ‘brown bag lunch’ session given by Lucy Royal-Dawson, Project Officer with Equalinrights, explaining the emerging concept of frontloading for human rights and discussed its potential and challenges. These fortnightly sessions give the floor to SIM staff and students or visitors to air their rights-focussed work or research for peer review and discussion.
Frontloading for human rights is central to the collaborative platform Global Initiative for Frontloading and Costing Human Rights (GIF). John Nakuta of The University of Namibia has derived a working definition of it as:
‘’Frontloading aims to redress a rights deficiency by interrogating the budget processes for the degree to which they comply with the generic and specific obligations of the right and by costing the necessary interventions that will redress the deficiency.”
The SIM students questioned how easy it would be to convince governments to allocate resources differently to resolve rights inequities, echoing the prevalence of a confrontational paradigm in many human rights contexts. Frontloading instead rests on a collaborative approach characteristic of rights-based approaches that require a partnership between different stakeholders, including budget makers from government, with interest in tackling systemic human rights inequities.
Another question highlighted the difficult choices faced by governments with limited resources on how to allocate funds between competing social needs. Whilst the frontloading approach does not as yet address this issue, the work of GIF member Waruguru Kaguongo (Centre for Human Rights, Pretoria) has highlighted the need to introduce rights-based principles that influence these difficult decisions.
As frontloading concepts and practice develop, Equalinrights welcomes the opportunity to share experience and learning at another brown bag lunch.
3. Gender-Responsive Budgeting in Morocco
Budgeting human rights means different things to different practitioners. For Equalinrights, the focus is on ‘frontloading and costing’, which is the preparatory work to make it possible to take account of an economic or social right in a national budget. For gender-responsive budgeting practitioners, the focus is on ensuring public funds are budgeted in ways that will advance gender equality.
Dr Sylvia Bergh explained this at a lunchtime lecture of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague on 11th February 2010 where she discussed her recent evaluation of UNIFEM’s Gender-Responsive Budgeting (GRB) Programme in Morocco. She explained that GRB does not involve creating separate budgets for women or increasing spending on women’s programmes, but it takes account of the ‘gendered’ impact of budgets and allocations. Traditional macro-economic analyses of budgets and expenditure do not take account of informal economic activities often done by women such as home-working, small-holding or house-keeping. As a result, policies, such as safety nets, often overlook the needs of women, or efforts to bring about gender equality.
The lecture, ‘Gender-responsive budgeting: what role for gender equality? Evidence from Morocco’, described the evaluation of the UNIFEM programme noting that 21 ministries were now preparing gender reports and including gender considerations in their annual budgets, compared to four in 2005. It is still too early to see the impacts of these efforts on gender equality, but Dr Bergh was convinced of the potential of GRB in the education, health and employment sectors. She was hopeful that GRB would become a requirement by law in Morocco and that links between civil society and government would be strengthened.
4. Transformative Learning for Human Rights (TLHR) – From the field
A number of Kenyan civil society organizations ‘working for change’ held a consultation workshop in November 2008 with Equalinrights as a key stakeholder.
The purpose of the workshop was to reflect on the struggles of Kenyans for a new society and to further deepen the role of the human rights ‘movement’ in those struggles. At the end of this reflection workshop, participants noted that although the human rights discourse played a major role in the Kenyan history of reforms since the early 1990s, the mainstreaming of this discourse has resulted in the ‘movement’ aspects losing ground to a ‘professionalism’ characterized by logframes and narrow project mentality and the subsequent de-politicization of human rights and the struggle itself.
Practitioners at this workshop - Kituo Cha Sheria (Legal Advice Centre), Pamoja Trust, Plan International Kenya, MissKoch, Community Organization Trust and the Institute of Social Ministry of Tangaza College, Catholic University of Eastern Africa - then started a journey together to evolve ways through an action research project, known as the Transformative Learning for Human Rights project, to tackle some of the challenges identified.
The objective of the first or pilot phase of this project (April - September 2009), was to trial ideas on action learning using transformative learning as the identified framework together with the experience and history of each participating organization within the overall context of struggle for an alternative society by Kenyan people since the early 1990s. A major activity during this pilot phase, was a reflection process involving the following main components:
- Introducing basic concepts on action research, transformation and transformative learning
- Tracing the organization timeline (history) to identify significant events and the reasons why those events are today seen as significant
- Exploring assumptions about change (as lived and experienced by the organization)
- Exploring assumptions on HOW change happens.
An important assignment to arise from this initial reflection is the documentation by each organization of its own history as a player in the struggle for change (transformative change, an alternative society). A subsidiary activity in the pilot phase included field visits by the research team members to touch base with the methodology each organization was using and the reality in which they were working.
The second phase of the project is ongoing and will culminate in the Joint Reflection workshop scheduled for 20-22 April 2010 where the participating organizations will meet to exchange views and ideas emerging from each organization’s history, perspectives on change and underlying assumptions and worldviews informing the practice of different organizations.
The final activity is a planned evaluation of the pilot phase and a documentation of all the lessons from the project. Results of this evaluation will assist in shaping the project process as well as inform the progression of similar processes currently ongoing in India and planned for later this year in Brazil.
For more information, contact Fred Ayifli.
5. WRR Report: Less Pretension, More Ambition
The debate about development aid has been raging ever since the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) report was presented in January 2010. Titled ‘Less Pretension, More Ambition’, the report has brought to the fore a number of pressing issues relevant for the future of Dutch aid. Although described by some analysts as a constructive contribution to the debate on development and aid, other commentators and analysts have been critical of the conclusions drawn and recommendations made maintaining that there was not enough clarity for implementation. The aid debate is not new in the Netherlands and neither is it new in the global sphere of development work. What the Dutch government think tank - WRR - has done is to put this debate back on the agenda of development cooperation. Equalinrights participated in two of the debates hosted by the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague as part of a series of planned events to contribute to the public discussions and debates on the issues raised by the report. Van Lieshout, the lead author of the report was at the first event held on the 2nd of February 2010, to respond to a litany of questions, criticisms and concerns raised by the report. This was followed by British development specialist, Roger Riddell who on the 4th of March 2010 added his voice to the debate in a presentation titled ' Too late for Development?' highlighting gaps in the report but also reflecting on key issues raised by the report.
A series of similar public events are planned and Equalinrights will continue to actively participate in these discussions.
6. Announcements
The Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), 1-14 March 2010: will take place across the globe from the 1st to the 14th of March 2010. Since it was first launched in 2005, IAW has grown to become one of the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar. Speakers and full programme available at www.apartheidweek.org
If you are planning to organize IAW in your city in 2010, please contact: iawinfo(at)apartheidweek.org
ISS Seminar Report: The report of the seminar "Global Crises, Global Answers. The International Dimension of the Human Right to Food" held on 3 the December 2009 at the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS) is now available. The document also contains useful links to the reports of the ETO conferences, which provide the background and state of the Extraterritorial Obligations (ETO) process.
Economy Transformers: In March 2010, Economy Transformers are holding several meetings to discuss their vision for a better world. Their mission is ‘a community that generates a vision, framework and action plan based on theory and practice for an economy that serves humankind and nature.’ This cooperative and voluntary people-driven experiment is hosted on a Ning site. Contact Sarah Denie to be invited.
7. Forthcoming Events
10-14 May 2010: Third annual training course on Monitoring Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva, Switzerland: Hosted by the Project on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, this course will provide participants with the know-how to get started in monitoring economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights).
For more information on the course, please visit the Academy’s website.
19 July - 26 August 2010, University of Toronto, Canada. Women's Human Rights: Building a peaceful world in an era of globalization: The six-week WHRI module brings together a balance of academic/theoretical inquiry and engaged, activist praxis. Deadline: 15 May 2010*.
16-20 August 2010, University of Toronto, Canada. CEDAW for Change: This module within the six-week WHRI is open for additional enrollment as a one-week intensive for those who cannot attend the full course. Deadline: 16 July 2010*.
*Full details of the modules are on the WHRI website. For inquiries, contact WHRI Program Director Angela Lytle.
8-9 December 2010, University of Pretoria, South Africa - World Human Rights Moot Court 2010 Competition: The Competition is open to undergraduate students from all institutions of tertiary education in the world. Participation in the competition is not restricted to law students, but it is expected that in most cases the teams participating in this event will be comprised of students who study law.
For all Moot related information or queries please visit University of Pretoria website or contact: Cherryl-Lee Botterill, Tel: +27 82 780 4647.
8. Resources
Reading the Books: Governments’ Budgets and the Right to Education
Authors: IHRIP/IBP, 2010
IHRIP and the International Budget Partnership (IBP) have developed this 28-page booklet primarily for human rights groups who focus on education, to assist them in adding budget work to their research and advocacy tools, and for applied budget groups concerned about education budgets and interested in using a human rights framework in that work.
Human Rights and Pro-poor Growth
Authors: M. Foresti, K. Higgins and B. Sharma, ODI, January 2010
This Briefing Paper reviews the findings of an ODI study on the relationship between human rights and pro-poor growth, identifying points of connection, as well as contradiction.
Reducing Group-based Inequalities in a Legally Plural World
Author: C. Sheppard, CRISE Working Paper No. 75, 2010
This paper examines the interaction between different sources of formal human rights protection and diverse, overlapping and coexisting social and cultural orders – or regimes of informal law, and highlights how the plurality of law affects equality rights in institutional, community and global contexts.
The Economy of Occupation 25: Israel owes billions of shekels to Palestinian workers
Authors: Kav L'Oved and the Alternative Information Center (AIC), February 2010
In this report, an approximation is made of the amounts deducted by the Department of Payments from the salaries of Palestinian workers from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) who were employed in Israel, or which were deducted for them from their employers, from 1970-2009 ostensibly to finance various social rights for the workers.
9. Staff News
Welcome
A new part-time Project Officer, Zairah Khan, for the Global Initiative for Frontloading and Costing Human Rights (GIF) will be joining Equalinrights on the 22nd of March 2010:
Zairah Khan / The Netherlands
Zairah Khan holds an MA in Social Psychology and Development Sociology. In the course of her studies, she became particularly interested in globalization, identity and movement theory and continued this interest both as an activist and professionally after her studies. From 2007 until recently she was the founding coordinator of WO=MEN, a Dutch Gender Platform of organisations and individuals working on gender justice. At WO=MEN, Zairah became acquainted with the principles of gender budgeting and global shifts in financing for development. Increasingly fascinated by the economic aspects of social development, she has found a new challenge in GIF. Zairah has also worked in the media and as a freelance journalist. In her spare time, Zairah remains active in the women’s movement and is a keen fiction writer.
