Anne Meike Fetcher

Yes, human rights work must be measured, but we need to focus on the small steps as well as the “big picture.” In the quest for accountability, techniques such as Results Based Management,(RBM) which tend to focus on “outputs”, “activities” and quantifiable “results”, are often not useful to human rights organizations. Regardless of their specific issue area, human rights groups work towards fundamental social change.

Is “Do-It-Yourself-Aid” the answer to funding rights work? Anne-Meike Fechter describes this model, its funding and related implications As Nora Lester Murad has recently argued, alternative models to international aid are much needed. Alongside debates on how things can be done differently within the NGO sector, and presenting models of good practice, there is a whole set of funding streams that tend to go unnoticed in both academic and policy debates.

Amidst tighter donor budgets for human rights, NGOs in Bangladesh are also grappling with increasingly intrusive governments. For non-government organizations in the developing world, a major problem is shrinking sources of funding triggered by tighter budgets in the developed world. But many developing world governments are not helping either. In fact, some are becoming increasingly intrusive towards NGO funding, especially toward rights organizations.