Human Rights

Dear Colleagues/Experts,       The International Peace and Development Training Center (IPDTC) is inviting expert professionals, policy makers and practitioners for its upcoming Autumn Programs. The programmes are designed for UN agencies, governments and national and international organisations....

This manual complements ISSAT’s Introductory Level 1 Security Sector Reform Training Course. It aims to provide a basic overview of Security Sector Reform (SSR) policy and practice based on collective experience in supporting security  and justice reform efforts.  This manual provides an overview of the theoretical background and key practical insights needed to engage in SSR programming, setting out the main principles but also highlighting various challenges that could arise when engaging in SSR....

  Many bodies aim to mainstream gender, but few track how effective they are in doing so with monitoring and evaluation.  The mechanisms used to monitor and evaluate development programmes, projects and policies have so far been largely gender blind....

In 1995, the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and The Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA) began working in partnership to manage the “Promoting Women in Development” (PROWID) grants program, funded by the Office of Women in Development at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)....

There is increasing recognition that economically empowering women is essential both to realize women’s rights and to achieve broader development goals such as economic growth, poverty reduction, health, education and welfare. In the last five years, a broad range of organizations have committed themselves to the goal of women’s economic empowerment....

Working toward the reduction and elimination of gender-based violence, ICRW partnered with CARE Balkans and CARE International to implement a groundbreaking program working directly with young men between the ages of 13 and 19 to deconstruct masculinity in their cultures and determine how gender norms and male socialization lead to inequitable attitudes and behaviors toward women and girls. ...

This Issue of Accord draws on multiple perspectives from across societies in both countries to explore comparative lessons and examine progress, building on analysis and recommendations from previous Accord publications on Liberia (Issue 1: 1996) and Sierra Leone (Issue 9: 2000) [see BOX 1]....

As part of the multi-country Governance and Transparency Fund (GTF) program funded by UKAID, Search for Common Ground (SFCG) in Burundi implemented a three month project from June until September 2011 in support of its overall programmatic goal: to promote inclusive, effective and responsible participation in a process of social transformation toward a fair and equal society in Burundi. The goal was supported by the following key objective: Promote constructive exchange and dialogue between and among Burundian youth from different political parties and political leaders about governance issues, particularly political manipulation of youth and its resulting violence, with a view to encouraging peaceful cohabitation. ...

Access in Micro finance and borrowing microcredit and getting working opportunity in garment sectors and another big or small industries or business and other institutions make them financially solvent. Now Micro finance organizations help them to start a small or medium business and by getting these opportunities they can earn and help others to be solvent women....

This evaluation was commissioned by a Steering Committee of bilateral cooperation donors and aid agencies, to review conflict prevention and peacebuilding policies in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Drawing on examples from a portfolio of projects funded by Steering Committee members, the evaluation is designed to provide general conclusions relevant to all international interventions in the eastern DRC. A team of fifteen consultants representing eight nationalities was deployed to design and carry out the evaluation over a period of twelve months between 2009-2010....

Understanding how social norms affect change in practices and behaviours is becoming an increasingly ‘hot topic’ in development discourse.   ...

The paper concentrates on those aspects of monitoring and evaluation that distinguish a rightsbasedfrom other development approaches. It draws on the literature on rights-based approachesand on recent thinking about monitoring and evaluation. It is primarily addressed at colleaguesworking for Save the Children, but it should be of interest and relevance for a wider audience,primarily NGOs but also donor and UN agencies....

This report analyses different aspects of the creation and implementation of a set of housing rights indicators. ...

There have been three major development paradigms in the post-war period.  Each has kept the core content of its predecessor while adding additional concepts.  The first emphasized economic growth.  The second achieved the inclusion of social development, often formulated in terms of basic needs, on an equal footing in terms of importance.  The third is currently in process.  It is generating an inclusion of concepts related to the realization of human rights and covers issues such as empowerment, justice, accountability and governance.  Economic and social development objectives are integrated and redefined as rights.  Goals become mechanisms or instruments to ensure benefits to which people have legitimate claims.   Redefining the objectives of development in a broader human rights paradigm also, and more subtly, results in a quite different positioning of ‘process’ as an objective in itself, rather than just a means to an end.  Process was previously assessed primarily in terms of its effectiveness and efficiency.  In a rights paradigm, process is also assessed in terms of its quality.  Progress in some of these domains may necessarily be defined in qualitative, rather than quantitative terms.  So, positioning rights as the primary goal of development brings a range of new and different issues and concept structures into play....

Currently Nepal is going through an extremely volatile and long peace process. A Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) was signed in 2006 but, as Stedman (1997) argues, the signing of an agreement, while in the best case scenarios prevents a return to the macro war, does not eliminate all overt violence, for example so-called ‘spoiler’ or dissident violence....

GENERAL GOVERNANCE INDICATORS LITERATURE ...

All governments are required to adopt the necessary measures to instructlaw enforcement officials, during basic training and all subsequent training and refresher courses, in the provisions of national legislation in accordance with the UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials as well as other basic international human rights standards applicable to law enforcement officials. These standards should be made available as widely as possible to the general public and fully respected under all circumstances....

Search for Common Ground conducted a survey to assess the baseline for an upcoming initiative in Nepal, ‘The Peacebuilding Initiative (TPI)’. The TPI program, which promotes consensus building among a variety of stakeholders, is comprised of two main components, dialogue with key stakeholders, youth and woman as well as a media program....

The issue of children affected by armed conflict is one of the priorities outlined in the 18 month troika programme ‘Strengthening the European Union’s Role as a Global Partner for Development’ as jointly agreed by the three Presidencies of Germany, Portugal and Slovenia....

The OECD DAC Handbook on Security System Reform: Supporting Security and Justice provides guidance to operationalise the 2005 DAC Guidelines, Security System Reform and Governance, and closes the gap between policy and practice. It largely follows the external assistance programme cycle and contains valuable tools to help encourage a dialogue on security and justice issues and to support a security system reform (SSR) process through the assessment, design and implementation phases....