Food for donor's thoughts
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DONORS AND HUMAN RIGHTS:
1. It should be clearer to many of you by now that focusing on sus-
tainable poverty alleviation is inseparable from bringing about
greater respect of Human Rights and greater equity.
2. As we have discussed, current development thinking is at a cross-
road. This gives us a golden opportunity to influence overall devel-
opment strategies and particularly the professional 'lords of pov-
erty' to move a step closer to putting Human Rights issues at the
center of poverty eradication. In this endeavor, we cannot leave it
up to (undefined) 'others' to carry out the needed steps to bring Hu-
man Rights center stage and miss this 'close to a last ditch opportu-
nity'. This sense of urgency must be heightened for all of us, in-
cluding donors: technical actions will simply not bring about sig-
nificant improvements in the condition of the poor.
3. The myth of the Chinese proverb of 'give me a fish and you'll have
fed me for a day, and give me a net and you'll feed me for life' has
to be debunked. This fallacy is repeated over and over again. The
real question is who owns the pond/lake/river/ocean and what the
RIGHTS of the poor are to fish there. Access to the Commons (or means
of production, for that matter) is not to be taken for granted!
4. Donors have to join together to perhaps start by funding Human
Rights violations' inventories in the recipient countries; these data
are to be published annually in a publication of the type of UNICEF's
'The Progress of Nations" or UNDP's 'Human Development Report' where
countries are actually ranked according to their respective Human
Rights performance. (Attempts to this already exist).
5. Effectively using these data later to tackle identified Human
Rights violations at national and sub-national level will then become
the main challenge for committed donors (would some of them also need
revisioning/remissioning retreats?).
6. As is true for NGOs, donor agencies will thus also have to more
forcefully pursue Human Rights-promoting, bottom-centered, empowering
interventions. They will have to bring recipient governments to the
table to negotiate binding commitments (with signed memoranda of un-
derstanding) to move in the direction of poverty eradication via the
Human Rights approach (with specific poverty-redressing and rights-
upholding objectives), including the close monitoring of progress.
Funds can then be released in tranches based on the achievement of
negotiated verifiable Human Rights indicators along the implementa-
tion line of funded projects.
7. A donor-NGO/civil society link and funding window should be devel-
oped concomitantly along the same lines (for remissioned NGOs). In
case of non-responsiveness or non-performing government projects, do-
nor funding should be progressively reallocated to the NGO/civil so-
ciety sector. Non-performing NGOs should be dropped under the same
guise.
8. All this may only add up to a start -- and from the top at that.
But it is a start in the right direction. Next, we will have to let
most inputs for future actions come from the more directly affected
themselves. Perhaps most of our energies will need to be spent on the
latter. The road ahead will, for sure, require our greatest boldness
ever.
Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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