UNDP Oslo Governance Centre

Civil Society Voices on Applying a Human Rights Based Approach

This network initiative aims to inspire and encourage network members in applying a HRBA in their work and to promote an understanding of what this approach entails in practice. NGOs and the broader CSO community have come a long way in institutionalizing a HRBA and there is much that can be learned from their experiences and strategies in this area.

Contributions/Suggestions
Network members are invited to recommend to Emilie Filmer Wilson any international and national NGOs and the broader CSO community that they would like to hear more about.

HURITALK Network Issue 3, december 2007

The Experience of Hakijamii Trust
“Reconstructing Rights and Development-
Methods for Community Empowerment”

Interview: Opiata Odindo, Executive Director, Hakijamii Trust, Kenya; November 2007

Hakijamii Trust is a Kenyan NGO that provides legal assistance and representation to victims of forced eviction. Hakijamii Trust also conducts legislative advocacy on housing and water rights, conducts community-based training on these issues, and works to support and strengthen slum dweller federations in Nairobi and Mombassa. One of the core strategic objectives of Hakijami Trust is to empower community organisations to claim their economic, social and cultural rights.

1) The mandate of your organization is to strengthen the capacity of people to advocate and realize their economic and social rights. What practical strategies have you found to be the most effective in fulfilling this aim?

The two most important practical strategies we employ are training and direct support for local actors and activities.

The goal of our trainings is to enable local actors to independently advocate and realize their economic and social rights, such as the right to housing, to water and to a decent standard of living for local communities. To do this, our trainings try to focus both on “the what” and “the how” of social and economic rights.

Training on “the what”, or the substance of rights will focus on what social and economic rights are, whether or not they are fulfilled in the locality, how they are or are not protected by law, and what the government is doing or not doing to protect or fulfil these rights. Training on “the how”, or advocacy processes, focuses on how to plan a local campaign and build constituencies, how to use local and national media, and how to build democratic mechanisms into campaigns in order to increase their legitimacy and ensure that they are truly representative of the people they claim to represent. The most important lesson we have learned from our trainings is that “the how” and “the what” should always be considered together in the local context, in order to make trainings relevant and practicable for local communities.

Thus, the international human rights framework plays only a supporting role in our trainings, and not a main focus. For local communities, the international legal and normative system is not immediately relevant unless it can be used to strengthen an argument about local situations, and we feel that it is important that human rights and development problems are framed and understood in the terms and the realities of the people who claim them. Our experience shows that this approach is the most effective way to train local communities and reinforce their self sufficiency in the long term.

Local activities sometimes require direct support to be effective, however, and in such instances we provide practical resources and campaign materials, advice or even money to local campaigns and actions that are planned, organized and implemented completely by local actors. This is our second most important strategy for strengthening the capacities of communities.

2) How does the work of an organization that deals with rights and legal processes fit within the development framework or within the human rights based to development framework?

According to the way a ‘human rights based approach’ is used in contemporary discourse, our work clearly fits that definition, since we addresses traditional development challenges through human rights principles, processes and legislation. However, we resist what seems to us an attempt to pigeonhole our work as either human rights or development work, or even as a rights based approach to development. This is because we feel that such a label reinforces a dichotomy between human rights and development that is artificial and indefensible, both historically and conceptually.

In our work, we treat human rights as the fulcrum of development in the sense that human rights have always been about the preservation of human dignity and progressively raising living standards for human beings, both at the individual and collective levels.


3) How do you see the concept of participation to be distinct in development work and human rights work?

Participation has lost much of its meaning in contemporary human rights discourse and advocacy. For work in the “development field” especially, there is a real danger that participation can become nothing more than episodic and symbolic consultations, without any attempt to address the fundamental issue of power structures.

For ‘participation’ to be truly realized, it must address four key issues, namely: what is decided, who makes the decision, how is the decision made, how is it implemented and monitored.

Participation within the human rights context only makes sense when these issues are engaged and the underlying reasons for exclusion and marginalization are meaningfully addressed. At its best, human rights work can then avoid romanticizing marginalization and poverty, and instead become an instrument for resisting power imbalances and reforming social relations.

4) Based on your experience, what do you think are some of the mistakes human rights advocates should watch out for in their work on development related issues?

The most dangerous mistake is to juxtapose human rights and development, and to see them as distinct or even opposed fields, rather than treating development as the very basis of human rights.

Another dangerous mistake is to regard development as being engaged with “hardware projects” for the poor, such as infrastructure or construction of latrines. A third and related mistake is to assume that the provision of services is not human rights work.

Lastly, human rights advocates working with development should try to avoid being overwhelmed by the constantly changing jargons and theoretical debates surround development—the so-called paradigm shifts of the field—and instead focus on concrete causes of inequality and exclusion.

5) Based on your experience in working both with grass roots advocacy movements and national policy processes, do you feel that it is possible for national NGOs to bring these two fronts together in their work?

This is not only possible but imperative. The starting point for such work is to appreciate that the NGOs cannot substitute themsleves for the people, and that all of our work should be aimed at strengthening the capacity of marginalized groups to assume decision-making powers.

Work that acheives this will inevitably contribute to processes of democratization, and will strengthen the transparency and accountability of public officials and institutions. When such change is driven by capacity development at the lowest levels of society, and the organic demands of a nation’s people, it will be more powerful and sustainable than when ‘alien concepts’ are imported by donors and other foreign actors.

In a practical sense, the most important starting point may be for NGOs—especially large national and international NGOs—to engage in a more meaningful way with communities. Interacting directly with communities, and allowing this interaction to inform and shape the way programmes are planned and implemented, cannot help but have an influence on an organization’s advocacy work at the national level. This is a good starting point.

6) Does the work of Hakijamii Trust engage with or benefit from the international human rights machinery?

Advocacy is a multifaceted process, and must by its very nature rely on a plethora of resources and interventions. The international human rights machinery has become very widely accepted, and this can make it useful in specific instances, especially for advocating to national government.

Specifically, we have used the Human Rights Committee’s Concluding Observations on forced evictions to advocate with the national government, and this has led to the development of guidelines and the establishment of a task force on evictions. We have also submitted shadow reports to the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Commmittee, and hope that these will be reflected in their Concluding Observations, to support our national work.

7) How can UN agencies contribute to your work to strengthen participation in local development processes?

The primary step necessary for UN agencies to contribute to local participatory processes is of course a question of self reflection and commitment. If there is a true commitment to strengthening participatory process in a given country, then UN agencies are well positioned to invest in community groups in order to enhance their capacity for engaging directly in policy dialogue.

By enabling communities to engage in public policy discourse without representatives or agents, UN agencies can contribute to reducing the risk of elite capture and the preservation of power imbalances. Though this also implies that agencies will limit their own role in development processes, it is of utmost importance for local development. There is now a real risk that in many instances the rapid proliferation of civil society organizations is simply building a new aristocracy, which has no intention of changing power relations.