Visualizing Rights in Liberia
TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR NEW SCHOOL'S PRACTICUM PROGRAM STUDENTS
Name of Organization: Center for Economic and Social Rights
Address: 162 Montague Street, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201 and Fuencarral 158, Madrid, 28010, Spain.New York phone/fax: (718) 237 9145/ (718) 237 9147
Madrid phone/ fax: +34 91 448 3971/ 91448 3980
Website www.cesr.org
Contact Person: Gaby Oré Aguilar, Program Director. Email: gore@cesr.org
Name and Title of Students' Supervisor: Sally Anne Way, Senior Researcher. Email: saway@cesr.org
Organization's Mission and Activities
The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) is an international NGO that works for the recognition and enforcement of economic, social and cultural rights as a tool for promoting social justice and human dignity. The Center has been working for social justice through human rights research, advocacy and network building since 1993. We seek to influence policy through an interdisciplinary approach to monitoring economic and social rights violations, integrating socio-economic analysis in advocacy efforts to make the international human rights legal framework operational. We work in collaboration with local and international NGOs, social scientists, legal and development experts, policy makers and human rights practitioners to provide tools for strengthening human rights analysis and advocacy at the local, national and international levels.
The Center's current work seeks to address the gaps between the legal recognition of economic and social rights and the widespread lack of compliance with them in practice and contributes to address the gaps between development and human rights in practice. Our areas of work are:
1. Global advocacy: placing human rights at the core of socio-economic policy and development efforts to tackle poverty and inequality;
2. Country advocacy: challenging obstacles to the enforcement of economic and social rights in contexts of rights vulnerability and crisis;
3. Capacity-building: arming social justice advocates with new methods for exposing economic and social rights violations and demanding accountability.
CESR research and advocacy work seek to bring about concrete policy changes to improve social and economic rights in multiple contexts - both local and international. By combining the strengths of traditional human rights monitoring methodologies and advocacy strategies with those of rigorous socio-economic research, CESR intends to contribution to advocates' ability to hold governments accountable for violations of economic and social rights. One of these strategies is the development of the project entitled: Visualizing Rights: Making Human Rights More Graphic', further described below.
Description of Proposed Project for New School Fellows
a) Visualizing Rights in Liberia project
This project aims to build on CESR's earlier project Visualizing Rights: Making Human Rights More Graphic' for which 10 country factsheets were produced. These ‘factsheets' visually present data in graphic form, as well as raise narrative questions about the extent to which specific governments are fulfilling their human rights obligations, focusing on economic and social rights.
The Visualizing Human Rights project's overall objectives are: a) to strengthen the monitoring capabilities of the UN human rights system and other regional human rights monitoring bodies. As such, the factsheets have been distributed among members of the UN Treaty Bodies, UN Special Rapporteurs and UN Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review; and b) help strengthen the monitoring and advocacy capabilities of local and national human rights NGOs, particularly as they relate to the UN system. NGOs could for instance integrate the organization's graphic illustrations when they produce shadow reports for the Treaty Bodies or contribute information for the UPR mechanism.
The factsheets operationalize the use of human rights indicators by dissecting, analyzing and displaying existing socio-economic, development and budget data regularly published by various international organizations, as well as by national statistics bodies and other respected sources to capture the manifold dimensions of government's obligations, such as minimum core obligations, the progressive realization of ESC rights according to maximum available resources, and non-discrimination.
The objective of the "Visualizing Rights in Liberia" project is to contribute to efforts by civil society, UN and governmental agencies in Liberia to analyze and interpret development data from a human rights perspective.
Internship Specific Tasks:
The research carried out by the New School's Fellows will contribute substantively to the production of the Visualizing Rights in Liberia project, by:
a) Collecting data on existing socio-economic, development and budget data indicators and statistics. This includes identifying, selecting, registering and drafting a document that organizes and presents organizing the data collected according to the guidelines provided by CESR research team.
b) Producing a brief resource guide and literature review to advise social justice and human rights advocates with a listing of key international and national sources of socio-economic, development and budget data to be used in economic and social rights monitoring.
In order to accomplish these tasks the Fellows will be asked to carry out research about the human development indicators of the country selected, through an extensive review and integration of the economic development, policy and human rights literatures available. The research will for example seek to relate health and/or education statistical outcomes in the country to other comparable countries and to data over time, and aim to disaggregate the outcomes according to regional, socio-economic, ethnic and gender lines.
The Liberia factsheet will illustrate the need for a human rights approach to tackle various forms of inequality and discrimination (ethnic, gender, regional or socio-economic disparities) in a transitional context. Its objective is to highlight the insufficient attention given to economic and social rights and various forms of inequality in development and reconstruction programming based on aggregate-level benchmarks and targets, and to demonstrate how an approach centered on states' economic and social rights obligations as well as obligations of non-discrimination can be useful in unmasking and overcoming persistent inequities (understood as unjust inequalities) that must be tackled in order to address structural socio-economic problems that exposed vulnerable groups to exclusion and violence in Liberia.
Use of research and data collected
The outputs produced by the New School's Fellows would be integrated in a factsheet to be produced by CESR research team and this will be used as a resource for advocacy and capacity building activities, including a possible training workshop targeting Liberian policy makers to build capacity to interpret development statistics from a human rights perspective and to facilitate the sharing of expertise between UN, governmental and civil society actors.
Qualifications
a) Commitment to and understanding of international development issues, the UN system and economic, social and cultural rights;
b) Familiarity with internet database resources on socio-economic and development data from various international agencies and trusted sources, such as UNSTAT, the World Bank, WHO, regional and NGO databases, Demographic and Health surveys, among others;
c) An interest in quantitative and qualitative analysis of social science statistics;
d) Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Excel in order to organize descriptive data and convert these statistics into charts, graphs and other visual representations;
e) Excellent writing and communication skills in English; attention to detail; ability to work independently and to take initiative on specific tasks; ability to synthesize and evaluate data;
f) Although background knowledge on the Liberia context is not a requirement, it would be well considered.
Duration
The products are expected to be completed by the end of the fall semester (May 2011)
Core Documents
Terms of Reference
Timeline
Final Presentation
Additional Documents
Navigate: All Spring 2011 practicums