Canada’s human rights-based approach to international assistance - A checklist for project creators

According to Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy, you must use a human rights-based approach to design, implement, monitor, assess, and evaluate your project and its results. The steps outlined below will help you integrate this approach into all stages of your project.

Step 1: Understand the broader situation through a human rights analysis

A) Identify the core human rights issue and its causes: which human rights are being violated and why?

• Identify the international human rights obligations of the focus region.
  • Which international human rights treaties has the State ratified?
  • Are there human rights listed in these treaties that are relevant to your project?
• Identify ways in which these human rights may not be respected, protected, or fulfilled
  • Look at the recommendations from United Nations Treaty bodies and other reputable sources.

B) Identify the key stakeholders and their capacity gaps:

• Identify the rights-holders. Rights-holders are the people whose rights are engaged by the challenge or problem that your project is going to address. These individuals are also called the project beneficiaries in Global Affairs Canada’s results-based management guidance.
• Identify the capacity gaps that prevent rights-holders from:
  • Knowing, exercising and claiming their human rights; and
  • Seeking effective remedies when their rights are violated or abused.
• Identify the duty-bearers. Duty-bearers are State actors at any level of government (federal, state-level, municipal, etc.). These actors have a legal obligation to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights of rights-holders.
• Identify the capacity gaps that prevent the duty-bearers from:
  • Respecting, protecting and fulfilling their human rights obligations to the rights-holders.
• Identify the responsibility-holders. Responsibility-holders are non-State actors who have no legal obligation under international law to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights. Instead, responsibility-holders have an actual or potential influence on the human rights problem you are trying to solve with your project.
• Identify the capacity gaps that prevent the responsibility-holders from promoting human rights.
• Duty bearers and responsibility-holders are also referred to as intermediaries in Global Affairs Canada’s results-based management guidance.

Step 2: Consider human rights when planning and designing your initiative

• Incorporate human rights considerations into your theory of change:
  • What are your project’s main assumptions about the human rights situation in the focus region?
  • What will the impact of your project be on the human rights situation in the focus region?
  • What are the key risks or contextual factors that could prevent your project from making this impact?
• In the logic model, identify the ultimate, intermediate, and immediate outcomes of the project in human rights language:
  • At the ultimate outcome level:
    • Describe the desired long-term positive changes in the safety, freedom, dignity, security, education, or well-being of rights-holders. Make sure you describe these changes in human rights language.
  • At the intermediate outcome level:
    • Describe the changes in behaviour, practice or performance of the rights-holders, duty-bearers, and/or responsibility-holders. Reflect the key human rights principles in these desired changes.
  • At the immediate outcome level:
    • Identify the gaps in the human rights capacity of stakeholders (rights-holders, duty-bearers, and responsibility holders). Address these gaps in the outcome statements.
• Integrate human rights into the performance measurement framework by:
  • Adding indicators that reflect human rights language.
  • Disaggregating the data you plan to use to measure the expected outcomes and outputs according to relevant identity factors. Identity factors include, but may not be limited to:
    • Sex
    • Gender
    • Age
    • Race
    • Ethnicity
    • National and/or ethnic origin
    • Religion
    • Language
    • Sexual orientation
    • Disability/ability and
    • Geographic location
• Address the human rights-related risks that you identified above. How will you reduce the impact of these risks?
• Conduct the planning and design phases of the initiative in a human rights-sensitive manner. You can do this by applying Canada’s key human rights principles to the process of planning and design. Canada’s key human rights principles are:
  • Participation
  • Inclusion
  • Equality
  • Non-discrimination
  • Transparency
  • Accountability

Step 3: Address human rights throughout project implementation, including monitoring, assessing, and evaluation

• In the project implementation plan, describe how the project will advance specific human rights. Explain how you will monitor progress on or progress toward the expected outcomes, including the advancement of these rights.
• Complete an assessment that describes what human rights-related risks the project poses to project beneficiaries/rights-holders. Explain how you will reduce these risks.  
• Address new human rights concerns as they come up by updating the theory of change and the implementation plan.
• Carry out the initiative in a human rights-sensitive way. Apply the key human rights principles throughout the process of monitoring, assessment of progress and evaluation. This includes a participatory approach that considers the opinions and input of right-holders.
• Make sure that neither project monitoring nor project evaluation causes unintended harm to stakeholders. This includes the stages of collection, storage and publication of indicator data.