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On the Ground

Explore our work with partners, globally and locally, to tackle social and economic injustice using a human rights lens.

Year-long Commitment to Universal, Quality, and Gender-Transformative Public Services

Year-long Commitment to Universal, Quality, and Gender-Transformative Public Services

The Implementation of the Santiago Declaration through 2023

A year ago (from 29 November to 2 December 2022), the Conference ‘Our Future is Public’ (OFiP22) occurred. GI-ESCR was part of the leading group of organisations that coordinated this unprecedented gathering of movements and NGOs working for public services and against privatisation. The conference was attended by nearly one thousand delegates, in person and virtually, from 113 countries, representing 567 organisations from various sectors.

The conference was rooted in years of a growing global mobilisation of grassroots, national, local, cross-border, rural and urban organisations, and movements. Key previous milestones of the broader public services movement included the first global ‘Future is Public’ conference in Amsterdam in 2019; the Enough is Enough webinars in 2020 and 2021, at which international and regional human rights representatives considered the critical role that public services play in building more sustainable, inclusive, socially just, and resilient economies and societies; and the Global Manifesto on Public Services. Led by GI-ESCR and adopted in October 2021, the Global Manifesto has been signed by more than 225 organisations.

The result of OFiP22 was the adoption of the Santiago Declaration, which calls for universal access to quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society. During 2023, following the commitments from the Declaration, GI-ESCR has worked transversally and in solidarity with other CSOs and movements to build collective analysis, develop joint activities, strengthen the frameworks on the important role of public services for the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights, and its financing through progressive taxation policies.

 

Following OFIP22, GI-ESCR actively worked towards advancing the agenda. Below, we present examples of the continuous collaborative impact of the Santiago Declaration.

Public services in Africa

GI-ESCR participated in "The Africa We Want: Reclaiming Public Services in Africa" conference organised by the Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) in partnership with the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability (ACCA) from 29th to 30th August 2023. The event was an opportunity to shed light on General Comment No. 7 of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights (ACHPR), which acknowledges African states' primary obligation to provide public services for their people and provides a framework to regulate private actors and hold them accountable.

OFiP-Kenya

As a follow-up of OFiP22, national and international non-governmental organisations, including GI-ESCR, came together to follow up on the right to quality public services in Kenya and to advocate against privatisation trends in the country.

Arts Competition in Kenya

GI-ESCR with the Centre for Human Rights & Peace of Nairobi University, agreed to organise an Arts Competition to motivate students to express their views, experiences, and perceptions on public services as a right and particularly on how they think public services contribute to building a just, inclusive, and equal society.

In this context, we organised an in-person community discussion with the participation of university panellists and partners like ActionAid International and OXFAM International to pursue the conversation around the theme of public services for building a just, inclusive, and equal society. Students actively participated by sharing their perspectives on the historical and contemporary significance of public services in addressing socio-economic inequalities within Kenya. They also seized the opportunity to propose recommendations on how public services can be harnessed to construct a more equitable, inclusive, and just Kenya, aligning with the overarching theme of the Arts Competition.

The winning artwork showcased how the State can mitigate health risks by providing clean and accessible water to the community, prioritising environmental care, and ensuring medical accessibility in informal settlements by illustrating an ambulance's access to an informal settlement, facilitating the transportation of a pregnant woman to the hospital.

Regional Education Learning Initiative Kenya

GI-ESCR participated in the 6th Annual Convening of the Regional Education Learning Initiative Kenya (RELI-Kenya), with the participation of members from Uganda and Tanzania, held from 30th August to 1st September, that brought together approximately 20 member organisations, focusing on key themes such as Equity and Inclusion, Values and Life Skills, and Learner-Centred Teaching to ensure the right to quality education for all children in Kenya. The RELI network comprises more than 70 organisations that work to ensure inclusive learning for all children in East Africa.

Participatory Action Research on Health on Ivory Coast

Participatory methods are fundamental in empowering local communities while investigating human rights problems. They play an essential role in amplifying the voices and perspectives of individuals whose rights are affected. As part of this project, GI-ESCR joined forces with the Mouvement Ivorien des Droits Humain (MIDH) to conduct a participatory-action-research on access to healthcare services in Gagnoa, Ivory Coast.

This experience aims to empower local communities to share their understanding of the challenges they face in accessing healthcare services from a human rights perspective. At the same time, the community enriches the research by incorporating their invaluable experience of accessing healthcare services. The final action-oriented goal is to establish a grassroots, community-led committee responsible for monitoring and reporting right-to-health violations related to access to healthcare services, especially for marginalised populations, like women, disabled people and the chronically ill.

Economic Justice and the right to education

Within the Privatisation of Education and Human Rights Consortium (PEHRC), a task force on tax justice and education was set up, bringing together ActionAid, Tax Justice Network, TaxEd Alliance, Right to Education Initiative, Results UK, Education For All Sierra Leone and the University of Maryland. The task force aims to use tax justice to address the privatisation of education and includes the human rights lens to add value to the existing work on the topic. PEHRC is an informal network of organisations and individuals who collaborate to analyse and respond to the challenges posed by the rapid growth of private educational actors from a human rights perspective and propose alternatives.

Economic Justice and Public Services

GI-ESCR, with the support of The Geneva Human Rights Platform, brought together on 3-4 October 2023 human rights experts from 17 countries from Africa, Latin America, and Europe to discuss how to strengthen a human rights approach to social services and progressive taxation.

The meeting aimed to hold a South-South learning and sharing of experiences to ensure human rights monitoring bodies, in particular from the African and Inter-American Systems, continue to clarify States’ human rights obligations to provide quality public services financed by progressive taxation. 

With this meeting, GI-ESCR achieved holding a dialogue amongst human rights experts on how States can increase their domestic resources through progressive and fair fiscal policies– for the sustainable financing of social (public) services so that they become a reality. It also established the ground for possible common understandings and alliances between experts from the different regional systems and civil society.

Public Services Financed by Progressive Taxation

GI-ESCR has actively advocated for a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive global taxation. Together with the Initiative of Human Rights Principles in Fiscal Policy, we participated in a public hearing on human rights and fiscal policies before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on 6 March 2023, during its 186th Sessions held in Los Angeles, California. In the hearing, we highlighted the need for a human rights-based approach to fiscal policies based on regional cooperation and progressivity standards to guarantee economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights in the Americas.

We have also organised and participated in a series of events in Paris (15 March), Bogota (2-5 May) and Santiago (15-17 May), which laid down the ground for the first Summit on Progressive Taxation in Latin America and the Caribbean that took place during July in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

Additionally, we continued to strengthen and consolidate the Initiative of Principles of Human Rights in Fiscal Policy, for example, by actively joining the organisation of the Third Week for Tax Justice and Human Rights (3-7 July), a space for dialogue on tax cooperation in Latin America and the Caribbean, the feminist tax agenda and sovereign debt.

Finally, on 27 and 28 July 2023, we participated and engaged with the Summit on Progressive Taxation in Latin America and the Caribbean, which represents a significant event on public services and tax justice that has rallied a cross-sectoral movement of people and organisations throughout Latin America to influence governments’ fiscal decisions and to make the voice of civil society heard. This was also the ground for collective statements and advocacy campaigns towards broader international tax cooperation that brought attention to the link between tax justice, human rights, and climate justice, as well as the negative impact on human rights of the global rules governing the current international financial and tax systems.

Fiscal justice, climate crisis and gender just transition

On 8 October, GI-ESCR and partners participated in the “Reclaim Our Future” Conference in Marrakech (Morocco). The event was organised by a range of social movements and civil society organisations, aiming to hold the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) accountable for a broken and outdated global financial and fiscal architecture.

GI-ESCR and partners co-organised an interactive workshop called “A Global Financial System that Advances Human Rights? Towards a shared vision for a green and gender-just transition”. This event brought together a group of experts and activists to share their views on the principles that should guide the transformation of the international financial architecture. It detonated a debate on (i) how public finance need should be reimagined to achieve a gender-just transition towards a sustainable future (ii) how human rights principles and standards could reshape the global financial and tax system, (iii) collectively mapped out advocacy strategies based in green, feminist, and rights-aligned principles; and (iv) brainstormed effective strategies to achieve a gender-just transition that includes cross-movement organising.

Energy and environmental justice

On 5 September, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), jointly with other 17 partner organisations, launched the Declaration on Energy Democracy. This results from the two-day Energy sector meeting as part of the Our Future is Public conference in Santiago, involving various organisations working towards sustainable, democratic and universal energy for all. This Declaration aims to strengthen, expand and unify the many social movements and networks committed to energy and environmental justice. This means a fundamental shift in the understanding, value, consumption, and management of energy, considered a human right, of public ownership, against colonialism, profiteering good living, reducing energy consumption and sufficiency for all.

As GI-ESCR continues to champion human rights principles, it looks forward to contributing to a transformative shift in the international financial architecture to ensure quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services for realising economic, social, cultural and environmental rights.

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Climate and Environmental Justice

We have advanced rights-based and gender-transformative transition frameworks through research that centres the lived experiences of women and marginalised communities on the frontlines of extractive energy policies, promoting climate and energy frameworks attentive to the social and care-related impacts of transition pathways. We have developed a clear vision for a gender-just transition, firmly rooted in gender and human rights norms, establishing both the legal basis and the direction for the transformative changes our planet and societies urgently need. In particular, the ‘Guiding Principles for Gender Equality and Human Rights in the Energy Transition’, a collective effort built through online consultations, an in-person workshop and multiple rounds of revision with activists, practitioners and experts from around the world, outline a transformative vision for reshaping global energy systems through a human rights and gender equality lens.

Our work recognises that the climate emergency is both an existential threat and an opportunity to reimagine societies built on social, gender, economic and environmental justice. We ground our advocacy in feminist and intersectional principles, prioritising the agency and perspectives of communities in the Global South who have contributed the least to the climate emergency yet face its most devastating consequences. Central to our approach is the understanding that energy is not merely a commodity but a fundamental human right; essential for dignity, health, education, work and the realisation of countless other rights. We challenge approaches to the energy transition that risk replicating the harmful patterns of fossil fuel extraction and, instead, advocate for transformative policies that ensure human rights and gender equality as central to building climate-resilient societies rooted in dignity, justice and planetary well-being.

What's next?

We will continue to challenge approaches that treat energy transition as merely a technical shift, instead positioning it as an opportunity to reimagine economies and societies rooted in dignity for all, with particular attention to communities in the Global South who have contributed least to the climate emergency yet are most exposed to its worst effects.

We will connect community-level evidence and the lived experiences of those on the frontlines of extractive policies to national reform and global norm-setting, breaking down silos between human rights, gender, and climate movements, and advancing a shared vision that recognises just transitions as not only fundamental to achieving climate-resilient and sustainable societies, but as transformative pathways that advance social and gender equality, redistribute power and resources equitably, and ensure that energy systems serve the public good rather than profit.

We will mainstream rights-based and genderjust transition priorities in key multilateral spaces (particularly, within the Just Transition Work Programme and the to-be-developed Just Transition Mechanism, within the UNFCCC) to guarantee that just transitions are advanced at all levels.

We will also translate our work, through strategic advocacy, into at least two concrete policy wins, whether promoted, adopted, implemented, or scaled, in priority countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa, or Kenya), ensuring these policies align with human rights standards, centre gender equality, and reflect the needs and views of affected communities.

We will build momentum for the progressive recognition of the right to sustainable energy to shift dominant narratives away from purely extractive solutions that sideline gendered impacts, community participation, and Global South perspectives.

Economic Justice and Climate Finance

Our work has transformed the global discussion on fiscal policy in a more just, emancipatory and sustainable direction. Our approach has combined both high-level, expert contributions within decisionmaking circles, with bold, impactful work on narrative change with the general public.

We have been instrumental in the inclusion of human rights as a guiding principle of the future United Nations Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, a multilateral instrument with the potential of raising approx. USD 492 billion per year in public revenues currently foregone to global tax abuse. In the process leading to the ‘Compromiso de Sevilla’ decided at FfD4, we proposed and succeeded in creating a specific human rights workstream within the Civil Society Financing for Development Mechanism, which was critical to ensure that explicit commitments on the matter were included in the negotiating outcome. In a context of cutbacks in multilateral institutions, we have amplified the capacities of technical experts, providing rigorous technical support and leveraging our influence to ensure the enactments of groundbreaking standard-setting instruments, such as the 2025 UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Statement on Fiscal Policy and Human Rights, and the first ex oficio hearing on the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights on Fiscal and Economic Policies to Address Poverty and Structural Inequality, leading to an upcoming thematic resolution on the matter. We have also bridged the silos between multilateral tax discussions and climate finance debates, promoting ambitious financing commitments to increase international and domestic resource mobilisation during COP 28, 29 and 30.

At the regional level, our engagement with fiscal cooperation platforms such as the Platform for Fiscal Cooperation of Latin America and the Caribbean (PTLAC), where we are member of its Civil Society Consultative Council, and the African Anti-IFFs Policy Tracker, for which we participated in the pilot mission in Ivory Coast together with Tax Justice Network Africa (TJNA), have been critical in cementing a growing engagement between tax administrations and ministries of finance with international legal experts, exploring actionable and transformative initiatives, such as the taxation of high-net-worth individuals, beneficial ownership registries and corporate countryby-country reports, to be implemented at the international level.

At the local level, our interventions in fiscal reform debates in Chile, Brazil, Colombia and Nigeria have contributed to shaping legislative outcomes in a more progressive, rights-compliant direction.

As for our leadership in narrative change, we have a measurable track record in delivering tailored, innovative campaigns which have decisively expanded economic justice constituencies by appealing to a broader tent. In Latin America and the Caribbean, we created the ‘Date Cuenta’ campaign, coordinating over 40 organisations across civil society to deliver plain language, innovative messaging connecting progressive fiscal reforms to the financing of health, education and social protection. ‘Date Cuenta’ generated over 55 original campaign messages that were tailored to the realities of seven priority countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Honduras) and disseminated in Spanish, Portuguese and English. In doing so, we convened more than 65 online co-creation workshops with partners, coordinating a unified communications strategy which combined digital outreach, press and media coverage, and collaboration with influencers. Ultimately, ‘Date Cuenta’ resulted in more than 60,000 interactions on social media, coverage in major regional and international media outlets, including El País, Deutsche Welle, Bloomberg and France 24, and the participation of at least 63 social media influencers through 58 dedicated publications. In collaboration with Fundación Gabo and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, we also organised a two-day workshop in Bogota with 20 journalists from 13 countries, building a regional network trained in a human rights-based approach to fiscal policy that has since generated published media coverage on outlets such as La Diaria, Ciper, El Diario Ar and Milenio. Through ‘Date Cuenta’ and our regional advocacy, we strengthened civil society engagement in key processes, including the Financing for Development track and FfD4, co-organised highlevel dialogues with states and civil society from Latin America and Africa.

What's next?

We will shape the UN Tax Convention and its Protocols so they embed human rights principles, and we will stay engaged through follow-up processes (including the expected Conference of the Parties) to support effective implementation. We will keep linking tax and climate finance so that new resources mobilised through fiscal cooperation are channelled to adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage, in line with UNFCCC commitments.

Public Services for Care Societies

We have translated participatory research into accountability and policy outcomes.

In Ivory Coast, our work with Mouvement Ivoirien des Droits Humains and affected communities since 2023 exposed how privatisation and lack of accountability restrict access to quality healthcare. It contributed to the closure of 1,022 illegal private health centres, an executive instrument strengthening the regulation of private hospitals across the country, and the creation of a permanent complaints management committee in healthcare through a bylaw issued by the prefect of Gagnoa. Partners engaged through this process also advanced concrete improvements at facility level: members of the Gagnoa Midwives Association who took part in the participatory action research pooled resources to renovate the neonatal unit of the Regional Hospital, and the Director of the Gagnoa General Hospital launched an action plan to expand services and improve patient reception, with the facility receiving the award for best hospital in the country in 2025.

In Kenya, our research with the Mathare Education Taskforce documented the absence of public schools and the expansion of private provision, evidencing impacts on households and caregivers and strengthening demands for free, quality public education. This work contributed to stronger community agency and collective organisation, alongside ongoing strategies ranging from communications to litigation to secure a public school in the area, some involving GI-ESCR and others led independently.

Across Africa, this work is complemented by a multi-country study examining the human rights implications of austerity in education and health, including how regressive fiscal policies, rising debt burdens and persistent underinvestment undermine the financing and delivery of public services.

In Latin America, from 29 November to 2 December 2021, over a thousand representatives from over one hundred countries, from grassroots movements, advocacy, human rights, and development organisations, feminist movements, trade unions, and other civil society organisations, met in Santiago, Chile, and virtually, to discuss the critical role of public services for our future. Following the meeting, the Santiago Declaration on Public Services was adopted to demand universal access to quality, gender-transformative and equitable public services as the foundation of a fair and just society.

We are currently advancing work on care systems, linking public services and fiscal justice through integrated research, advocacy and communications, including a regional campaign framing care as a collective responsibility requiring sustained public investment.

What's next?

In Ivory Coast, we will evaluate and strengthen the complaints management committee and position it as a replicable model for other health facilities. In Kenya, we will support the Mathare community to co-design a model public school for Mabatini and Ngei wards, grounded in human rights standards. Building on our multi-country austerity study, we will drive national advocacy on financing for education and health: advancing reforms in Ghana; launching a fiscal policy and public services financing agenda in Kenya through the CESCR process and targeted coalition work; and, in Nigeria, using the new tax acts in force since 1 January 2026 to catalyse a national accountability campaign for adequately funded, quality public services. In Latin America, we will amplify locally led care pilots across 8 countries and turn lessons into influence—advancing care policies that strengthen care organisations, protect care workers’ rights, support unpaid caregivers, include disability and family networks, and redistribute care more equitably.