The pilot activites

— following a common approach

Metagora’s activities are headed towards:

• Identifying, documenting and making known current and recent work and initiatives in the field of measuring democracy, human rights and governance. The focus is laid on initiatives undertaken by national and local organizations;
• Developing and enhancing methods and tools that allow to obtain data and indicators upon which beneficiaries can formulate or evaluate policies promoting democracy, human rights and governance. Today, six Partner Implementing Organizations are implementing and testing these approaches around the globe. Each of these co-ordinated pilot activities (in Mexico, the Philippines, francophone Africa, the Andean Community, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Palestine) focuses on a specific theme and primarily aims at assessing local policy implementation.
  The pilot activities can be summarized in three groups: the ones developping pilot surveys for the diagnosis of specific human rights issues (Mexico, Philippines and South Africa), the household surveys on governance and democratic participation (National Statistical Institutes of francophone Africa and the Andean Community), the mapping of political and ethnic violence (Sri Lanka) and the matching of official statistics and data from NGOs and research centres (Palestine).
• Providing, on the basis of the results of these activities, outline guidelines on measuring, assessing and monitoring democracy, human rights and governance.
• Facilitating an informal process among the main producers of governance indicators, aiming at establishing a platform and an road map for a progressive international agreement on key indicators.

What common principles does Metagora follow?

Metagora is policy-oriented in scope, multidisciplinary in approach, inclusive and participatory in method. The originality of Metagora in comparison to other existing international initiatives and projects in the field of DHRG-assessment resides in its bottom-up approach to the development of internationally agreed indicators and related measurement methods: Metagora partners all work with tools and methods that are designed for a particular issue in a particular local context. However, these are tested to prove their strengths and capacity to produce policy-relevant results and will thus provide lessons and experiences that can be applied elsewhere in the world.