It’s almost Human Rights Day… But should the people of Tolon even care?

Volunteers and IGGs on quality research trip at Pagsung shea butter center

When our media sub team asked me to write a blog, it didn’t take me long to decide what I wanted to write about. Human Rights Day is this coming Saturday 10^th December and it has got me thinking. The organisation that I am doing my International Citizens Service scheme through, International Service, is a human rights NGO, but how have human rights actually played a role in my last six months on placement? What relevance do human rights have to the people we work with?

My Ghanaian counterpart, Francis, and I have led two groups of volunteers since June on a project that is by now very dear to my heart. Our project works with rural people in the Tolon district of Northern Ghana to improve their income generating activities, and to assist them to be better able to support their families.

We have assisted mainly women in income generating groups to become cooperatives (being in a cooperative provides many potential advantages), and to improve the quality of their product, be it shea butter, rice processing, or dressmaking. Both of our two cohorts of volunteers have worked very hard to help assist the groups that we work with, and I am very proud of the achievements that they have made.

However, as I thought about Human Rights Day, and what that means for Tolon, I realised something. If we were to ask the income generating groups that we work with what they think has been achieved together, they would list the research trips that we organised, the training sessions, the cooperative certificates, but they would never mention the advancement of their rights. Of course they wouldn’t. I’m pretty certain that most of the women that we work with don’t even know what ‘human rights’ means. So, how do human rights impact on the people that we work with, if they are unaware of their existence?

Rights Based Approach: what does it mean?

First, it is important to consider how human rights and development work together. International Service describes itself (on its website) as an organisation that takes a ‘rights based approach to development’. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights,

‘a human rights based approach is a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights. It seeks to analyse inequalities which lie at the heart of development problems and redress discriminatory practices and unjust distributions of power that impede development progress.’

In other words, an organisation that takes a rights based approach focuses on whether people have access to their rights, as defined under international law, such as the right to an education. It also focuses on how the organisation can ensure that people acquire these rights and comply with their duties to respect and provide these rights to others.

Human rights approach has brought in the donors and opened doors

So, how has a rights based approach impacted in practice on our NFED Tolon project? One such way is that it has contributed to International Service being accepted in Ghana, and has provided funding opportunities.

Whether you agree with human rights or not, they are universally accepted concepts under international law. Nearly every country in the world has signed at least one international human rights treaty. Therefore, it is easier for international NGO’s to offer assistance to a country when they aim to achieve the same human rights goals that a country has already subscribed to.

Furthermore, donors are more likely to donate to organisations that are safe bets, that take an approach that is universally approved of.

Therefore, it could be argued that by taking a human rights approach to development, International Service is better placed to gain funding and gain support from the countries that they want to work in. If International Service had not taken a human rights based approach, perhaps they would not have been successful enough to start up our NFED Tolon project at the beginning of this year.

Human rights approach is a participatory process

By taking a rights based approach to development, International Service has also been guided by certain principles deemed essential to human rights. One such principle is that development should be participatory, namely, that the people who are meant to benefit from the efforts of the NGO should participate in the design, planning and evaluation of a project.

It could therefore be argued that human rights have had an impact on the women that we work with when we conducted initial needs assessments to find out what they wanted from us, or when we have asked them whether they thought an event was successful and what needed to be improved.

Human Rights approach focuses on capacity building

Another way in which a human rights approach impacts on the work we are doing in Tolon is that it focuses on building the capacity of local people, rather than providing resources. International Service is very clear that it is a skills based organisation and not a resource supplying one.

This has a significant impact on the people that we work with in that we don’t provide them with school buildings or boreholes for instance, but with skills so that they have the capacity to go out and organise boreholes for themselves.

IGGs and volunteers at an awareness activity at Katinga market

Does it matter that the income generating groups that we work with don’t know what human rights are?

Regardless of the above ways in which human rights have impacted on the people that we work with in Tolon district, this can’t overshadow the fact that the majority in these communities still have no idea what human rights are.

For instance, when the project was set up, International Service and NFED Tolon would have designed the planning documents in line with human rights. But the majority of the women that we work with can’t read. They wouldn’t have been part of this analysis of human rights a great deal.

Then, as the project went along, various groups of volunteers would have turned up and maybe mentioned they were part of a human rights NGO, but most of the time the women we work with would have been listening for the part that told them what volunteers were actually going to do, rather than the rationale behind their work.

When considering the perspective of our beneficiaries, human rights wouldn’t have seemed particularly important, if noticed at all. But does this even matter? Who cares what tools or approaches are used if it brings the results Tolon district wants?

I decided to get the opinions of our team on this point. We all agreed that the majority of people that we work with don’t know what human rights are and we discussed whether we should be doing more to inform our community about human rights.

Some volunteers were concerned that by explaining rights to the people we work with, this would not improve our beneficiaries’ lives any more, and might even cause harm. For example, if they went back to their families and ‘demanded their rights’, this could have a destructive impact on family dynamics and not actually achieve anything.

Some argued that human rights are intrinsically a Global North ideology that can’t properly be made sense of in an African context. Therefore, human rights language could actually confuse and complicate matters rather than improve development. If this were the case, then it would be extremely important that the people that we are working with in Tolon district were aware of the actual harm International Service was causing.

Despite the fact that most African countries have legally recognised human rights as their own by signing international human rights treaties, and even the African Charter on Human Rights, demonstrating a regional consensus that human rights are not, in fact, harming African nations, this argument raises the point that beneficiaries need to have a full understanding of the organisation assisting them in order to be able to protect themselves, and ensure that they are being assisted in a way that they agree with.

Therefore, perhaps a compromise needs to be found between encouraging local people to understand and be aware of their rights, yet introduce this awareness in a strategic and gradual process, so as not to disrupt communities.

In sum, despite a lack of awareness surrounding their rights, human rights have a significant impact on the women that we work with. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness of our beneficiaries’ rights, albeit in a strategic and gradual manner. 

Post by Katie Connan