Human Rights and Development

Mr. Ramesh Singh,
Chief Executive Officer of ActionAid International

Often I am used to listening to academia, and I appreciate you making a bold and nice gesture by allocating time to listen to the practitioners. The student in me is nervous to be presenting in front of so many academics, but the practitioner in me is excited to be able to share the excitement, the challenges of the front line of development and human rights. I hope that I will be able to situate, or at least provide some context for what you will be talking about at this conference. I have chosen, for my focus, to explore the dynamics, or the changing concept and context of development, as well as some description of my work on the frontlines and the challenges that we face.

Let me start by saying that word “development” itself is very rarely used in my daily work. It is one of the most commonly used terms, but it is a very generic, all-encompassing term in contrast with more specific terms like “social justice” which is used, in my opinion, by those who don’t really want to do development rather than those who actually want to. For purpose of this communication I’m willing to work with this term. Having said that, I should point out that the overall concept of development, over the course of my 35 years in the field, has changed from being a fundamentally economics based idea to being much more broad based, and I am pleased to say that it is increasingly centred on people, rather than just money and markets. Over time the concept of development has become more focused on people and communities and has become more holistic.

The UN agenda for development defines development as related to quality of life for all people. A bit earlier than that, if you look at the 1986 Rights to Development, it defined development as a comprehensive process of social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of life and active participation of the people and entire population in development, as well as the fair distribution of the benefits resulting thereof. So, you can see that concepts of development have become much more broad based. Development as freedom is another idea that has entered the discussion in recent years, and this has led into the more recent idea of development as justice. So, as you can see the idea of development is now more encompassing and widening than Increasingly, particularly in the last 10 years, convergences have been happening between development and human rights. I am very excited by that and I will come back to that in a few minutes. This is intrinsically also linked with the notion of justice.

I would like to point out that the recent debate about the climate crisis also extends the debate beyond just people, and places, to planet. In addition, the climate crisis means that the human rights and development debate expands from just this generation, but generations to come. This expanding concept of development is hard to keep track of sometimes, but it is very exciting. It has given more energy and political clout to what we are doing. What does development mean to the practitioner? To me, development is all about people, development is for all. It’s about dignity, it’s about freedom, it’s about rights, it’s about well being. As I said, it’s all about planet, about flora and fauna, air and land and how these interact with people. It’s also important to conceptualize development as both a process and a result. Similarly, we try to look at development as a means, not just as an end in itself. We also try to look at it as never-ending. It’s a continuous process of change. In fact, it is useful to say that development simply is change. Much of ActionAid’s work, related to development, has been about removing the constraints and blockages that stop us from being development. Development is certainly about imagining a just society, but in a practical sense it is about removing barriers such as deprivation, exclusion, exploitation, expropriation, that actually prevent development. Much of my day-to-day work is about removing these barriers to development.

These days, we don’t normally argue about what development is, the consensus ends when it comes to deciding HOW to develop. There are so many different methods depending on ideology, geopolitics, theories, and many of these methods are contradictory and in opposition to one another. We must recognize that while there is an emerging consensus about what development IS, how to get there is incredibly contested. I’m not too sure if the consensus needs to be there, but certainly it’s so contested that it’s part of the barrier to development itself. Regardless of the diversity of competing methods for development, I think there has been a dominant model, and that is the capitalist, neoliberal Western, or Northern model of development. It has had a hegemonic place since the end of the Cold War. However, the recent financial crisis certainly has taken the air out of this balloon of capitalist, neoliberal hegemony.

Now, I’ll move on to a little more of my practical experience. Before I start out, let me read out a few startling statistics. I want to explain the context in which we are working. In Burundi, which is a country in the great lakes region of Africa, 88% of people live on under 2 dollars a day, and people have to pay for health care, and we have recorded cases of people being imprisoned when unable to pay their hospital fees. In Ghana, the average life expectancy is only 58 years. In Liberia, 1 in 8 children will not live to see their 5th birthday. In Malawi, 1 woman in every 100 will die in pregnancy or childbirth, and, the 14 million people in Malawi are looked after by only 266 registered doctors. In Mozambique, 1.3 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 60 percent of HIV infected people are adult women. In Nepal, a newborn baby dies every 20 minutes and 49 percent of children have symptoms of chronic malnutrition And in Sierra Leone, life expectancy is 34.3 years.

Let’s indulge in some statistics at a more aggregate level. Every year 4 million newborn babies die within 28 days of birth. Since 1990 there has not been any change in the number of women dying in pregnancy or childbirth. Today, over 1 billion people are chronically hungry. That means 1/6th of the world’s population, or the total population of Europe, USA, and Canada combined living in chronic hunger. 1/3 of children in the world are growing up hungry and malnourished. Women produce 70% of food but own only 1% of the land. Between 2006 and 2009, 15 – 20 million hectares of land in developing countries have been grabbed by large multinational corporations and agri-businesses. At least 776 million people in the world are illiterate At the end of 2008, the number of people who were forcibly uprooted by conflict and persecution worldwide stood at 42 million I think these numbers are just staggering. Only last year the G8 nations promised that they would contribute $ 10 Billion to help end the hunger that has been created by the financial crises, but only about have of that has been realized so far. Similarly, in 2005, which was hailed as one the biggest poverty consensus at a G8 meeting, G8 countries committed $ 50 Billion per year by 2010 to end poverty. So far, they found only $ 35 Billion. So, we are 15 Billion short of what is needed to address immediate needs and immediate poverty. The stories, in my opinion, behind these numbers, are the stories of violation of human rights, stories of human insecurity, and an illustration of the massive indignity of so many people. This all sounds a bit grim, but this is actually to energize you hopefully. This is what keeps me going. I’m angry about it. This is outrageous data. These figures are not there for us to be sad about and be passive about, they are there to be passionate about.

It is true that, largely due to the success of China, and India, and some parts of Southeast Asia, we had started to see the overall aggregate numbers of poverty decreasing But, between 1981 and 2005, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America, all of these areas have seen increases in the number of poor people. Progress has been made in some areas; school enrollment has increased, and there are some other progresses, but by and large in this world of plenty—an there is plenty to go around, people have become a lot richer—these statistics are gross violations, there is something wrong happening, the system is not right. It is in that context that I would like you to take these statistics.

While remaining within the context of our work at ActionAid, let me quickly run through some of the key areas within which we are working. I find that political space is shrinking. If you look at NGO laws, nearly 100 countries since 9/11 have revised their NGO laws to make it much harder for civil society and non-governmental organizations to work. I think that electoral democracy is certainly being questioned, if not failing, whether it is in Thailand, or Zimbabwe, or Kenya I think that first-past-the-post electoral democracy is failing. Often multi-party democracy isn’t really multi-party, often it is a two horse race, and often that isn’t really working either.

I think we have started to see an increasing assertion of identity. Whether it’s faith, or ethnicity, or nationality, or even along the lines of race, I think that identity politics is much stronger now and I think it’s quite interesting, considering how globalized we have become, that identity politics has strengthened. Overall, I think that’s something that is actually impinging and negatively impacting our work.

Aid—which I consider to be a right not a donation—is losing popular supporting and funding from richer countries, and quite clearly aid is not going to be enough. So, the overall conversation is about moving away from aid to the larger concept of development finance, which takes into account anything from taxation to generating local production. In fact, we believe that if the tax loopholes from the developing countries are closed there will be something in the range of 800 Billion dollars worth of money available for development or developing countries. I think it is fair to say that geopolitics has clearly changed. I think that G8 is history now. I think that we are now talking about at least G13. In the last few months alone, G20 has met 3 times in the wake of the financial crisis. I think that we are on the way to having much more of a South-South politics. I think that India, Africa, Brazil, can work together to challenge the European Union and North America so much more now than they have been able to do before. So, while many of us used to have to run after the finance ministers of G8 countries, we will now have to look at our own finance ministries, even for international policy changes. I’m not quite sure if it’s Mr. Obama or the world, but certainly multilateralism is back in the world. We had this really desperate period of 8 years when unilateralism and bilateralism was what was promoted. I think we are going into an era of multilateralism. I think that the power of the corporation has not reduced, overall it is phenomenal and deeply linked with politics as well as consumption patterns. I think that we need to really look at the nexus of corporate power when working on development.

Increasingly we have begun to recognize that when it comes to development we are much more interdependent than we thought. The climate crisis and the financial crisis have pointed out that a global model based on greed and overconsumption has been disastrous.

If I had to sum up this long list of contexts, I would say that we have a context of Crisis and Convergence. 1: Crisis, fuel crisis, food crisis—which is a very real problem that will continue to worsen, and the financial crisis. However, crisis provides an opportunity to question the dominant model. 2: Convergence, in the past development people didn’t talk to environment, environment didn’t talk to labour, etc… in the last 5 years, so many different fields are starting to talk together, our frameworks are starting to converge.

For example, Amnesty International now does economic, social, and cultural rights, and their current campaign is about maternity mortality. Greenpeace is now going to come back to the earth from the sea. It is in this convergence that I find a lot of energy and potential, and we are having to redefine ourselves, build new capacities, and share a much more interdependent burden. The convergence is not simply between different sectors, but actually between the North and South. The climate crisis has made us recognize that our personal behavior has global consequences, not just in the South but in the North, and people see that they need to take more responsibility for their behaviours. People who used to think of themselves as “developed” now need to come back and reflect on the morality and sustainability of their own behaviour.

Let me take a few moments to explain how ActionAid has been engaging with these intersections between sectors of development. We’ve been excited by learning from and bringing in human rights approaches and thinking into our work. What has this done really? I think that a human rights framework has provided development with a much broader consensus area; a moral and legal consensus. It has allowed us to legitimize our work much more. It has also allowed us to move away from the word poverty—which, like development is a very coded and loaded word. Also, I have never met someone who has introduced themselves as a “poor person”, that is not an identity. So Human Rights approach has allowed us to move away from the discourse of poverty and the image of “poor people” towards ideas of community, and identity, and interests. This is very powerful, we have started to be able to mobilize social groups.

Human Rights based approach has actually highlighted the agency of the rights holders themselves. It’s important for practitioners to recognize the primacy of this agency and not see themselves as the agents. Action Aid clearly takes sides. There are people who are exploited, there are people who are exploiting, and I think that we cannot remain neutral. Paulo Friere has said that remaining neutral is taking the wrong side. This is a very important idea for us. Another element on which we converge with human rights approaches is the area of power relations and power politics. All of our work is informed by an analysis of power structures. Once we start getting into that, the organizing and mobilizing of the rights holders become much more important and this is fundamental for us and for the human rights approach.

For a very long period of time, civil society and NGOs used to take pride in the idea that we existed because the state was useless. We saw ourselves as running parallel to the state. NGOs and civil society now see that we cannot leave the state alone, we cannot run parallel, we must hold them accountable, the bear the duty. Working with the state and holding them accountable is a big part of our embrace with the human rights approach.

This approach has also allowed us to expand our thinking from regional to global. When I first started learning about development, I was told that we should think globally and act locally. For me, that just doesn’t work now. We have to both think and act globally and locally. If we want to remove the structural barriers to sustainable development, we need to work at all levels, local, national, global.

I think that on the whole, development is not a charity, it’s not even solidarity, it is a duty. We have a duty to act. I work as a matter of duty to eradicate inequality. The elements of duty have been brought into our work by the human rights based approach.

In conclusion, I want to say that this an exciting period of time and a time to mobilize our energy and be angry. We need a little bit of outrage, but we also need to take the opportunities that have been provided by the recent crises, and by the successes of social movements and collective action in recent years. I think that there is a light at the end of the tunnel; equality can be reached and has been seen in some communities already. That is what I would to leave you with, the appeal to become part of this larger movement, and that is what really keeps me going. Changes can be small. It may be a person who came to our literacy class 5 years ago who has now become the chair of their community development committee. There are many small changes we see. We must be able to add up these small changes and move towards social, economic, and environmental justice and equality and not be daunted by the size of the task. I would like to leave you with that appeal and express my solidarity.