By Shira Stanton
I just got back from Haiti, where CESR was helping the UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights with training. The "training of trainers," whose participants comprised Haitian government represenatives, civil society organizations and MINUSTAH (the UN's mission in Haiti) human rights staff. Part of MINUSTAH's human rights section's new program on monitoring public policy, the training focused on how to monitor budgets from a human rights based approach.
The training included a basis for understanding how human rights was relevant to development issues and the general Human Rights Based Approach (HRBA) framework. CESR's presentation on analyzing public policies using a HRBA framework, focusing on why such an analysis is crucial for human rights, how to carry out this analysis, and how it is relevant to Haiti's situation.
The training continued with presentations and exercises on budget monitoring, including a presentation by a representative of Porto Alegre (Brazil) and their successful participatory budgeting. Methods and tools were introduced, including a practical exercise on Community Scorecards in the local schools. The week's training finished with how to use these tools and monitoring findings for advocacy purposes.
Also while in Haiti, CESR met with the National Observatory on Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONPES) to discuss issues of data collection and using indicators for human rights compliance monitoring.