What are effective ways to evaluate the impact of a grant-funded project on human rights?

Human rights evaluations are obviously focused on performance indicators as they relate to human rights. However, they often differ in HOW they are done. In disability and mental health settings, a human rights-based evaluation is often done in collaboration with, or led by, people with lived experience. This reflects the participatory and lived-experience-led approaches reflected in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Often people without lived experience of the problem miss signs or misinterpret data. And often the benefits from evaluations go to the evaluators, not the lived experience communities. That's why collaborative and lived-experience-led evaluations are so important when looking at human rights.

The best way to evaluate and analyze if your company, service, product, or NGO respects and promotes human rights, is getting to know your targets personally, live around them, spend a couple of months talking and bonding with some of your target or ideal customers, learn their needs, present your product, help them understand it and get their insights, and above all, be honest, for example, if you are going to collect customer data, let customers know, this is how we collect data, this is how we use it, this is how we store it, etc.. How does it make you feel? And above all, restudying the declaration of human rights, lot's of times we forget, but there's a lot there, so it's easy to miss something.

As per usual evaluation, the Human Rights one is indeed a systematic process looking at different contribution perspectives. While it is difficult to assess the impact of the intervention, it might be beneficial to look at the strengths and current benefits that a programme brings to the field. As well as what are the main barriers to enjoying one's human rights. Thus, the human perspective is indeed the most valuable input an evaluator might get in the process, as Human Rights are about individuals.

This is crucial because we need to make sure, not only that we don't violate human rights, but we promote and defend them, it hasn't been easy to get them, we need to fight and put all our efforts into keeping them, improving them if possible, and make sure those are applied everywhere. The human rights evaluation allows you to do all of this, it allows you to understand and see what does it need to be improved, what areas are doing great, what things can be done to tackle the problems etc...

One thing that might assist in the process is to focus on the human when considering the importance of the evaluation. It is crucial to consider whether an intervention did not bring negative consequences to the beneficiaries or their communities. Thus it is important to learn what had a positive outcome and try to replicate the results. However, it is also to be taken into account that every locality, state and region is different and it will require tailoring the interventions.

Before moving to designing, It is crucial to define why there is a need to evaluate, and what will be evaluated. I think it is a good practice to outline the main stakeholders and consider their interest in the evaluation. The stakeholder Matrix could be a useful tool to assist in making decisions on how to interact with stakeholders. Then, one might look at the resources available, and discuss further what are the available options when designing the evaluation.

Perhaps a better point is to consider "who" you are doing the evaluation with. As noted above, people with lived experience of the problem should be central authors and thinking partners to your evaluation (presuming you don't have lived experience). To the greatest extent possible, the measures of success should reflect what the community impacted by the human rights issue want. Of course there may be efficiency, efficacy, and auditing measures and criteria, but these should not outweigh the lessons and value that could be generated for the community to use and reinvest in itself.

You need to define the target of your product, and then get to know your target, and brainstorm with your target, and ask yourself and your target, what are the pros and cons of your product, what are all the functions, what it does, does any of that risk any human right? Are all protected, are there steps we can take protecting them, for example, in data collection and GDPR, we collect data, we let people know because it's their right, but they also have the right to be forgotten, and we don't have a system to erase customer data, if nothing happens it's everything alright, but you can see, at the moment any customer wants to exercise that right, it's not going to be able to, and that right will be violated.

Once you have the evaluation designed it's time to collect the data, how is it going to be done? Are we doing interviews? surveys? Getting insights from users, from possible customers, then analyzing all the data and base on those analysis extracting conclusions. And organize nicely the results to report them, so those are easy to understand by everybody in the organization, based on those results, creating an action plan, and executing, what does it need to be done to fix our failures and improve our strengths as organization to keep the human rights of our people?

A human rights evaluation can be used in several ways, like holding governments, businesses, or organizations accountable for their human rights practices, to develop the policies and strategies that affect human rights, to raise awareness about specific human rights issues and promote understanding and action, to advocate for changes that better respect and protect human rights. But, about all, to make sure, everybody has their human rights preserved.

Some examples could be evaluating a country's adherence to the rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or assessing a company's labor practices in relation to the International Labour Organization's conventions. Maybe analyzing the impact of a new law or policy on the human rights of a specific population group. In my case, as a software engineer and technical specialist, I could use my skills to develop tools and systems that facilitate human rights evaluations, such as data collection and analysis tools, or platforms for sharing and discussing evaluation findings.

Something else to consider is the importance of participatory approaches in human rights evaluation. This means involving the people who are affected by the issues, policies, or practices being evaluated in the evaluation process. Participatory approaches can help ensure that evaluations are appropriate and accurate, and this is vital.