Project

Human rights and democracy campaign

Grantee: Association pour la Recherche et l'Education pour le Développement en

Aiming to contribute to the emergence of responsible and aware citizens in four of Senegal’s regions, the project provided information on human rights and democracy in the country’s most common languages – Wolof and Pulaar. The project also aimed to ensure citizens access to legal and administrative texts through local document libraries; and trained local resource persons to be involved in the establishment of democracy and human rights monitoring centres.
The project responded to clearly existing information gaps and its relevance was enhanced by the fact that it sought to build the capacity of local officials and leaders to implement decentralization policies and other decision-making processes. It is a matter of concern, however, that the project did not include any lobbying component targeting the government itself, to address the language issue at policy level, which was the principal root cause for lack of relevant legal and administrative documentation.

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Lessons from Project

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Democracy and human rights monitoring centres were not established, because they were considered highly political by local officials. It was probably overambitious on the part of the project to seek the establishment of formal structures to monitor governance. A more detailed analysis, carried out by researchers or organizations with specialist expertise in local governance issues, would probably have led to a better understanding of the power politics at stake. The grantee reacted ad hoc, and took an alternative approach requesting trained community leaders present in the field to act as focal points in the monitoring of governance.

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The activity of drafting handbooks on issues including human rights, decentralization, and conflict management was a key prerequisite to the training, which took five instead of two months.

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Some partnership agreements lacked detail. Cooperation on the development of the manuals and the implementation of the initial training session was undermined by misunderstandings. These stemmed in part from the failure of the agreement between the partners to set out clearly their tasks and responsibilities.

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Promotion of the use of different national languages could have enhanced democratization, decentralization and development, to better implement Senegal’s international human rights commitments.

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The project did not consider why legal and administrative documentation had not already been made available in languages other than French. Targeted lobbying would have been appropriate to highlight the necessity of translating legal and administrative documents into the different national languages and to facilitate their use by locally elected officials and rural communities.

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Feedback on the project’s impact demonstrated that some attitudes held by members of target groups changed as a result of the project and that access to legal texts and to the training has measurably reinforced the capacities of local officials and community leaders. This was particularly the case for women.

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The project was part of a well thought-out strategy on governance. The grantee used the project to transition from support to the development of national languages, to an approach based on democratization and the exercise of fundamental rights in development. The project effectively gave shape to this transition – a testimony to the excellent strategic thinking in the organization.

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The grantee’s multidisciplinary approach brought together organisations with complementary areas of expertise mixing rural development, democratization and human rights. This proved appropriate and contributed to the success of the project.

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