By DR.GEORGE DIDI BHOKA, MP OBONGI CONSTITUENCY.
Human rights are legally binding entitlements that human beings have from birth to death. Rights are inalienable, indivisible, and interdependent.
Citizens have rights to security of life and property, health and well being, food and income security, freedom of expression, participation, and engagement in decisions and actions that affect their quality of life and standard of living, among others.
Government and partners have a collective duty for progressive realization of the rights of their citizens to good standard of living and quality of life, leaving no one behind.
A human rights based approach to development requires government, partners and citizens to:
1-Assess and analyze the rights of citizens that are not being realized.
2-Conduct a causalty analysis to appreciate the immediate, intermediate and structural bottleneck to the progressive realization of the rights of citizens to development.
3-Propose short, medium and long term interventions to address the bottlenecks for sustainable development.
4-Assess and analyze the capacity of duty bearers to progressively meet their basic, intermediate and advanced needs and wants.
5-Build the capacity of duty bearers starting with households and families to meet their needs by skilling, tooling and facilitating them to engage in wealth creation activities.
6-Supervise, monitor, evaluate and hold accountable all duty bearers at all levels for progressive realization of their rights to development.
7- Strengthening partnerships and collaboration between citizens, communities, civil society, private and public sector for sustainable development.
This requires focussing on results based planning, budgeting, supervision, monitoring and evaluation.
We can achieve more with the resources we have now and in the future if we focus on human rights, equity and results based approach to planning and programming at all levels of government.
The author is an international public health specialist, development commentator, and Legislator.
