What do rights have to do with poverty?

ActionAid is a world leader in the field of rights based development work. But what exactly does this mean?

Human rights are important weapons in the fight against poverty and injustice

Right now, I’m in Copenhagen at a meeting of ActionAid country directors and we’re discussing exactly that.

I’m here with nearly 100 other ActionAiders and the first two days have been dedicated to Human Rights Based Approaches to poverty eradication and development – the very soul of ActionAid.

I thought I’d take the time to give you a quick introduction to our approach and why it’s so important.

Rights Based Approaches for ActionAid means that everything we do aims to help people claim their human rights – now and into the future.

These rights include the obvious ones such as the right to education and food, but also other rights that are particularly important to people living in poverty – such as the right to life and dignity in the face of HIV and AIDS and the right to just and democratic governance.

Importantly, our commitment to a human rights based approach goes beyond delivering services such as health clinics and schools – to create an enabling environment for people to claim their human rights.

Of course, we do deliver services such as support for education, healthcare and agriculture, especially to people affected by conflicts and emergencies. You can’t expect someone to stand up for their right to just and democratic governance, for example, when they haven’t eaten a proper meal for a week.

But even when we do deliver services, we adhere to a rights-based framework. That means giving people the tools, information and freedom to choose what assistance they want and not prescribing pre-packaged solutions to meet our emotional need to “do something”.

It’s all about maintaining people’s dignity and helping to grow local capacity to protect, promote and enjoy their human rights.

It is also important for us that people develop an understanding of their government’s responsibilities and how they can hold their governments to account to deliver on both their promises and international obligations to treaties they’ve signed such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In many ways, we’re investing in people rather than infrastructure, because only people can bring about the change needed to end poverty and injustice for good.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?