1. Democracy and Human Rights

Overall Goal: The overall objective of this programme is to promote participatory democracy, a human rights culture and constructive management of conflicts.

Programme Overview

The programme focuses on civic education for citizen empowerment. It aims at giving citizens information and training to be active participants in the affairs of the country. The programme also enhances public participation in parliamentary reform processes. It also aims at strengthening relations between civil society and parliament. It promotes and protects basic human rights of the Basotho nation.

Programme Purpose

The program is set up to:

• To strengthen democracy, respect for human rights and the culture of constructive management of conflicts in Lesotho.

Programme Functions

A. Promoting Public Participation

The program strengthens public participation in decision-making. This target is cross-cutting for all the projects in this program.

B. Capacity Building for local authorities

The propgramme trains local community leaders on leadership, governance and conflict resolution. A lack of leadership skills had made it difficult for counselors to approach and address issues of the communities without creating conflicts. The programme also trains members of the councils in public participation to improve their approach to community involvement in community-driven development. Chiefs also trained on what the local government is all about and how they should work harmoniously with the members of the community councils.

C. Civil society engagement

The programme holds a series of consultative meetings and workshops with civil society organizations. The consultative meetings constitute a forum for debate and dialogues between CSOs and MPs. This is done to increase public policy engagement with parliament.

D. Constructive Management of Conflicts

The programme focuses on strengthening the ability of Basotho to constructively manage conflicts. This is in response to the high incidence of conflict in politics, local government, schools and communities at large.

E. Inculcating a Culture of Respect for Human Rights: The programme strengthens respect for human rights in Lesotho by promoting human rights reporting, socio-economic rights, rights of vulnerable groups such as prison inmates, people living with HIV/AIDS, children etc.

F. Public/Civic Education: The aim of the function is to intensify public education on matters of governance. This is in response to among other the glaring apathy of the public to participate in matters that affect them due to lack of knowledge.

G. Human Rights Education

The project works with young people within selected project sides to raise awareness of human rights generally and the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

H. Human Rights Monitoring

The project has opened up avenues for collaboration with the Government’s Department of Lesotho Correctional Service (LCS). This is meant to improve monitoring and reporting on prison conditions, rehabilitation and other vulnerable groups such as children whose parents are serving sentences. Monitoring includes to visits main prisons in Lesotho. Interaction between the project has with LCS has created space for debate/dialogue with the Ministry of Justice which also improved conduct and trust.

I. Human Rights Reporting

The program continues to play a major role in participating in country reporting for purposes of various human rights conventions. The project collects reports to assist in analyzing the level of human rights violations in the country. The project also compiles a series of articles, letters and stories with human rights issues from some of the local news papers.

J. Building networks with other institutions

The project works closely with other institutions, networks both within the country and outside. These include HIV and AIDS. The project has taken a rights-based approach on the pandemic. This reinforces collaboration, solidarity and building strategies and linkages among all the stakeholders. The interactions improve and provide capacity to the project personnel. The project strengthens networks with the outside institutions working on human rights issues on human rights dialogues, training and conferences.

K. Advocating for Socio-economic Rights

The project pursues a just course for all rights that are spelled out in the country’s constitution, but a particular interest has been on the socio-economic rights. This is meant to tackle a challenge on provision of services to the people an issue which is not justiciable in the courts of Law. It was also in advocating and raising awareness to the people that all authorities of the country should be lobbied and approached to realised the importance of making chapter three of the constitution to be justifiable in the courts of law.