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[claudio]

Human Rights Reader 40

BEYOND CAPACITY ANALYSIS: ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS
OF A HUMAN RIGHTS-BASED DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY. (1)

[In this Human Rights Reader series, we have focused on quite a few elements
called for in the implementation of the emerging human rights-based approach
to development --mostly in health and nutrition. Additional conceptual and
operational elements for its implementation are added at this time. As said
once earlier, the repetition of some human rights concepts is both
inevitable and also part of this Reader's intention to have them 'sink-in'
into the readers' everyday parlance by looking at these concepts from
different angles].

1.The 'chronic emergency' situation in the health, nutrition, education and
other service sectors in an important number of the developing countries
only sporadically . becomes a 'loud emergency'. However, if things stay
their present course or worsen, such loud emergencies will increasingly
become  inevitable.

2.At the base of this is the fact that we are witnessing a failure of
governments to sustain the provision of basic services, to pay the full cost
of such public services and to respect, protect and fulfill people's human
rights.  Moreover, traditional sectoral approaches to
development --aid-backed or not-- are not delivering expected results (or
are not delivering them fast enough to reach the Millennium Goals).

The need and the challenges:
3.There is thus an urgent need to accelerate the implementation of a human
rights-based development strategy centered around this emerging development
paradigm that incorporates the poor beneficiaries as protagonist actors.
This paradigm also merges ethics and science, ideology and politics and
theory and practice (i.e., what ought to be done and what can be done) into
one consolidated development compact --one that effectively responds to the
dire necessity here briefly sketched and one that is taken up as an active
engagement or covenant with the people whose rights are being violated
day-in, day-out.

4.A much wider participative and empowering Assessment-Analysis and Action
(AAA) process (2) --as an operational framework for the human rights-based
approach-- has to be set in motion (or strengthened if elements of it are
already in place). To bring about change, people have to come from their
very own experience (getting at their own realities). AAA processes are thus
tools of social mobilization and of mobilization and progressive control of
the resources needed. Such proactive AAA processes should be ultimately
pursued in all areas and sectors of development. Social mobilization only
succeeds if the repetitive/iterative character of the AAA operational
framework begins to work. Positive AAA processes will then lead to the
needed social mobilization at the community level. This mobilization
envisions a key role for mobilizers/animators with three types of skills,
namely:
-Moral Advocacy skills,
-Social Activism skills, and
-Political Advocacy skills.
These animators are the indispensable promoters of the needed mobilization
process; they become the catalizers in the interaction between outsiders and
the community -bridging the "them and us" schism between development
organizations and the community.
All active concomitant development AAA processes have to be identified and
assessed at national and sub-national level so as to select our strategic
allies and mark and neutralize our strategic opponents in implementing this
new human rights-based approach.

5.This rights-based approach will give equal importance to process and
outcome achievements, carefully targeting the most vulnerable in
ty      --those whose rights are most flagrantly being violated-- so as to
make the endeavor truly equitable.

6.Quite a bit can be learned from successful coping mechanisms already used
by households. Poor people are already doing; we need to asses what they are
doing and build from there. [Note that reinforcing coping mechanisms risks
locking the poor into a 'low level of changes' trap; it may keep them away
from pursuing a more radical reappraisal of their needs, one more related to
the structural determinants of their present condition]. Be it as it may,
these spontaneous (or project-related) success factors need to be documented
and better understood to consider them for eventual replication. (Keep in
mind that going for small gains first is OK provided the ultimate vision
remains to fully reverse gross violations of human rights).

The strategy:
7.The new human rights-based strategy will focus-on/center-around the
household and its members, i.e. around legitimate household members' rights
and their respective entitlements/claims. This means first providing for the
household members' basic entitlements, i.e., reaching a minimum level of
family security.  It is at the household level that we ultimately need to
achieve significant changes, especially in health, nutrition and sanitation
behaviors and status.

8.The needed community support mechanisms and structures to help identify
and assist vulnerable households will have to be developed and/or
strengthened. It is here where mobilizers (activists/advocates) become
essential. We will not achieve our human rights goals unless we put in place
a veritable "army" of such animators. (3)

9.The household entitlements/rights we are talking about here are in the
realm of:
-food and nutrition (macro and micronutrients),
-cooking fuel,
-health (curative and preventive),
-the care of children an the support of women to do so,
-clean water supply and sanitation facilities and services,
-education (pre-primary and primary with a focus on girls and female
 literacy/numeracy),
-shelter and clothing,
-income (in kind and in cash including employment opportunities),
-women's own gender-related needs and entitlements,
-access to credit (especially by women) and to selected agricultural inputs
 subsidies,
-legal protection (especially of women's and children's rights),
-physical environmental safety,
-physical personal safety during armed conflicts, and
-women's personal safety from domestic violence.

10.Key, easily measurable, process and outcome indicators (or proxy
indicators) for each of these entitlements will need to be agreed upon and
monitored in our work with communities.

11.To make sense of these indicators, the human rights-based strategy will
have to have its own Conceptual Framework (2) that will allow us to move up
and down the causality chain to inquire about/find out what determines the
findings represented by those indicators. Such a conceptual framework is
crucial to help us create a consensus on the causes of family insecurity and
the violation of its members' rights. When using the conceptual framework,
interpretation of the analyses is inevitably value laden; therefore, the
values have to be shared. (It is good to be reminded that, as social actors,
we inescapably become technicians with an identifiable --even if hidden--
political agenda).
[My own preference is for this conceptual framework to be "upside-down" in
relationship with the 1990 UNICEF conceptual framework of the causes of
preventable ill-health, malnutrition and early deaths: i.e., the basic
causes should be on top. If interested in one such tentative conceptual
framework being prepared for wider discussion, you can request a copy from
aviva at netnam.vn ].

12.The role of an indispensable (and specially designed) Information/
Education/Communication (IEC) component in the human rights-based strategy
needs to be emphasized here.
(Part two to follow)

Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
aviva at netnam.vn

(1): Capacity Analysis takes what is being proposed to be done for each
determinant of a human rights violation at each causal level and looks at
what is already being done or not being done (and why) for that problem. It
then looks at who should be doing something about it [individual(s) and/or
institution(s) who is (are) the corresponding duty bearer(s)] and attaches
the name of that (those) person(s) or institution(s) to each proposed
solution.  This results in a list of the most crucial persons/institutions
that have to be approached to push them to get the major proposed
solution(s) for each main problem implemented.

(2): Situation analyses have to be based on an Assessment and an Analysis of
the existing situation that will then lead to decisions being made for
Action; this has been called a triple A (AAA) process. But the assessment
and the analysis cannot be done in a vacuum --without previously having
worked on a Conceptual Framework of the causes of the problems that are to
be solved. This means that one has to have an in depth understanding of how
those problems come about --what their determinants are before one can, in a
participatory way, decide what the best options are to do something about
them, i.e., "one finds what one looks for". The essence of a good situation
analysis, then, is to carry out a Causal Analysis based on a pre-existing
Conceptual Framework and to base all decisions for action to be taken on
this analysis. Therefore, appropriate interventions for the main causes at
each causal level have to be found. Addressing each cause is necessary, but
not sufficient to change the outcome (i.e. preventable ill-health,
malnutrition and excess deaths). That is why communities need to act at all
levels of determinants at the same time (and this is also why so many
"selective PHC interventions" have failed in the past). AAA processes are
happening all te time already (consciously or not) in all decision-making.