Rights in a Fractured Order
Our strategy sets out to:
- Achieve concrete, measurable change on the ground
- Challenge the scarcity narratives used to justify
inaction and the underinvestment in people's needs - Shift power back to the people
We reshape, reform and reorient
the systems that shape people’s lives.
We work at the pressure points where the future is decided: how rights are financed, who controls service provision and whether the climate transition deepens injustice or delivers equity. Our three substantive areas, Public Services for Care Societies, Economic Justice and Climate Finance, and Climate and Environmental Justice, are not incremental agendas. They aim at reforms with the potential to reorder power, shift resources at scale and reshape the narratives that dictate what is politically possible. We focus on systems because they determine whether people can live with dignity or remain trapped in scarcity, debt, privatisation and climate breakdown.
Power doesn’t
shift on it’s own
Our approach focuses on shaping the ecosystem that determines decision-making through a threefold strategy:
After assembling and analysing evidence and listening to diverse voices, we promote arguments through innovative communication strategies.
Our new strategy allows for a sharper focus on our mutually reinforcing areas and a theory of change that combines:
- Narrative power
- Coalition-building
- Targeted multi-level advocacy
In a time of crisis of multilateralism and limited impact of the UN system, we’re shifting from broad engagement to targeted action at the multilateral level, and we’re deepening our presence and advocacy at the national level to drive tangible, rights-advancing change on the ground.
Explore Our Programmes
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.
Partner With Us
Interested in supporting this work?
We welcome conversations with foundations, public funders and aligned partners seeking systemic change.
