UNFPA at Work: Six Human Rights Case Studies

Summary table of project development exercises during NGO training1) Increasing the use of urban services:– Projects aimed at making the city more liveable, creating a pleasant environment and/or facilitating the use of the cityby women (e.g., by enhancing security, public transportation, lighting, streets and pavements; creating parks andchildren’s gardens; establishing walking tracks on the coast; improving rubbish collection; reducing dust and mud;controlling street dogs; improving traffic control during hours of travel to and from school; spraying insecticide tocontrol mosquitoes; and solving the housing problem).– Facilitating women’s urban travel through reduced-rate travel cards, free transportation on 8 March (InternationalWomen’s Day), adding bus stops near markets and shopping centres, organizing ‘connected' means of transport suchas ship-bus-train, increasing lighting for streets and stops and adding night buses for the suburbs.– Women’s cultural centres (creating a social and cultural space for women in the city; creating workshops for trainingand information, vocational and hobby activities, etc.).– ‘Women’s streets’ (converting streets that women are currently afraid to enter because of the concentration of derelictbuildings into sites for cultural centres and women’s enterprises).– Women’s services platforms (draft project for ensuring coordination among public services in the city).2) Decreasing early marriages for young girls.3) Women’s counselling and rehabilitation centre for combating violence, support centre for psychological problems,training/information/consciousness-raising activities, developing services for preventing honour killings.4) Sending girls to school (giving priority to girls’ scholarships, etc.).5) Healthy baby and mother (aiming at increasing hygiene and nutritional knowledge).6) Prevention of commercial sex work; supporting the victims.7) Improving women’s economic circumstances:– Agricultural production project proposal for increasing the food-intake guarantee for migrant, poor and single mothersand their children.– Project for spaces where women can sell their handmade products (for increasing self-confidence, creating salesspaces in district marketplaces and opening sites for sales).and local government bodies, at their own request, wouldnot have been nearly as valuable if UNJP had not also createdopportunities for the two parties to ‘learn by doing’ –to grow more adept at collaborating by participating sideby-sidein UNJP-coordinated activities, most notably in thesituation analyses, training events and development of thefive-year action plans.Flexibility is an important ingredient in successful humanrights-based programming. The joint programme was ableto foster capacity-building among disparate groups of governmentand non-government representatives becauseof its ability to ‘meet people where they’re at’. Differentparticipants in UNJP lacked different kinds of skills, andtheir capacity-building needs varied greatly across the sixselected cities. The programme was able to respond successfullyto the situation by entering into it without preconceptionsabout what the participants should alreadyknow or be doing.Flexibility also helped the joint programme capitalize onunexpected opportunities, as when some women’s NGOsand government representatives discovered that they hadsynergistic interests beyond the scope of the programme’scapacity-building curriculum. The NGO and governmentstakeholders were encouraged to find their own way forward8SIX HUMAN RIGHTS CASE STUDIES