As we approach the ten year anniversary of the Coalition for Human Rights in Development, we would like to celebrate our shared successes, learn from our challenges, and work together with our members and close partners to set our 2025-2030 strategy. In this page, you will find:
- a proposed timeline for the collective strategic planning process
- updates about the process and how you can get involved
- some context around the Coalition’s history and vision
In 2014, groups from around the world came together to form a coalition grounded in the Global South, with the goal to build power and secure human rights commitments from public development finance institutions. Since its early stages, the Coalition brought together diverse groups such as grassroots groups, social movements, Indigenous Peoples, women leaders, labour groups, groups working on disability issues, environmental activists and civil society organizations working at the local, national, regional and international levels. .
The first campaign of the Coalition for Human Rights in Development was to demand human rights due diligence during the World Bank’s environmental and social safeguards review. Soon, grassroots members and their allies questioned this initial focus on bank policy work at the global level. In response, Coalition members and partners started to prioritize and deepen collaborations with communities directly impacted by development finance.
Local and national members of the Coalition also indicated preferences to coordinate efforts at the regional level. This led to greater regionalisation of the Coalition’s work, including mobilization on regional development banks like the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank.
Additionally, communities and human rights defenders who were raising their voices about development finance-funded activities expressed concerns about escalating reprisals and how closing civic space stymied their participation. This led to innovative collective efforts to facilitate access to protection and security, and to leverage development finance as a protection strategy.
As more groups began to see the Coalition as a relevant and responsive network of relationships which they could shape to advance their collective goals, more members joined the Coalition. The Steering Committee of the Coalition also stewarded a growth in the budget and Secretariat size to be responsive to the growing membership and increased scope of the work.
Today, we have over 100 members, and many more partners, who work together through several regional and topical working groups, campaigns and initiatives to advance human right based and community-led development.
TIMELINE
To set our 2025-2030 strategy, we are co-designing a process with our members and partners. See below a proposed timeline:
UPDATES
Please find here a survey to help us shape our collective work from 2025 to 2030 (please fill by May 31, 2024).
Please note we are open to having multiple responses from each organization and let us know if you prefer one-on-one calls with someone documenting your answers, instead of filling the questionnaire. In the coming weeks, we will also be scheduling group consultation discussions.
SOME BACKGROUND CONTEXT
The foundational work for the Coalition for Human Rights in Development started in 2013, and in 2015 members formally adopted the current name. Since then, the Coalition has grown and changed: we now have over 100 members from Africa, Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world. The pandemic, the urgency around climate change, food insecurity, growing inequality and other factors have also shifted the context in which we operate over the years. You can learn more about our history on our website.
Since the last members gathering in 2017, our members and partners have been working with the Coalition secretariat to:
- Increase coordination on development finance at the regional level, with a focus on relevant regional development banks;
- Design, build, operate and refine the Community Resource Exchange pilot system to better collaborate with communities (affected by international investments and development finance) by linking them with skills, tools, resources and allies;
- Collectively mobilize through the Defenders in Development Campaign to leverage development finance to respond to reprisals and closing civic space while directly accompanying defenders affected by development finance activities; and
- Amplify grassroots voices on development finance and collectively build narratives that center communities and defenders as the experts of their own development pathways and priorities.
Throughout this time, various committees and working groups of members and partners have been setting strategy and implementing collective work for the various program areas of the Coalition. This work is being done both regionally as well as thematically. However, the Coalition is more than the sum of our regions of action or program areas. We need to look at our work together more holistically to decide how our global coalition of social movements, civil society organizations, and grassroots groups can better advance human rights-based and community-led development, and this is why we hope that all our members and close partners will join us in this strategic planning process.
