Food for planning the right human thoughts
------------------------------------------
HUMAN RIGHTS BASED PLANNING: THE NEW APPROACH
Part 1 of 2
1. All agencies of the UN regularly prepare long-term plans of action
for approval by their respective boards. To arrive at them, these
agencies go through detailed situation analyses that identify the
most important causes of the problems each specialized agency deals
with. As part of the latest UN reform process, the Secretary General
of the United Nations has recently mandated that, starting in the
year 2000, all agencies of the UN have to change the format of their
upcoming plans and switch to what has been called Human Rights based
plans of action. (1) Despite a rich literature on and a growing un-
derstanding of Human Rights in general, the Secretary General gave
few explanations of what exactly this new approach to UN planning
would entail.
2. UNICEF has taken a lead in defining in a bit more detail what Hu-
man Rights Based Planning means and entails for them. (2) What fol-
lows is a bare bones explanation of what this new concept is all
about:
3. All actions in development projects/programs have to be based on a
solid situation analysis. The latter has to be based on an Assessment
and an Analysis of the existing situation that will then lead to de-
cisions being made for Action; this has been called a triple A (AAA)
process. But the assessment and the analysis cannot be done in a vac-
uum --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 decide what the
best options are to do something about them. In other words, "One
finds what one looks for"(.based on a conceptual framework). (3)
4. In the case of advocating for better children's health and nutri-
tion, the first concept that has to be agreed upon is that poor chil-
dren's excess mortality, excess ill-health and malnutrition are actu-
ally Outcomes in the conceptual framework. The three are determined
by a series of Immediate Causes that include inadequate food intake
and high prevalence of preventable diseases. The latter two, are
themselves the result of yet another level of causality, Underlying
Causes, that include household food and fuel insecurity, inadequate
maternal and child care, low water and sanitation levels and inade-
quate access to (or utilization of) health care services, particu-
larly by the poor. This whole pyramid of causes has at its base a se-
ries of Basic Causes represented by limited access to education (par-
ticularly for girls) and insufficient community control (power) over
the resources (human, financial/material and organizational) poor
people need to solve their problems at each causal level. (3)
5. 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. There-
fore, 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. ill-health, malnutrition and
excess deaths). Communities need to act at all levels of determinants
at the same time. This is why so many "selective PHC interventions"
have failed in the past.
6. The above, basically summarizes what professionals in the field
were expected to be doing up to now when trying to solve poor chil-
dren's health and nutrition problems. But the upcoming Human Rights
Based Approach to Planning brings with it a new perspective to our
work.
7. The essence of the Human Rights based approach is that it tells us
that, additionally, we now need to carry out what is called a Capac-
ity Analysis (or accountability analysis). (2)
Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
--
Send mail for the `AFRO-NETS' conference to `afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.