People in a community have to walk for hours to reach the nearest health clinic. Why is the government’s budget not being spent to ensure that health care is more easily accessible to them? Where is the money going?

The government has raised primary school fees in the country, forcing many poor people to choose which of their children they can afford to send to school. Was it absolutely necessary that the government raise the fees? Was it possible to raise funds instead from other sectors of the society and economy?

These questions are typical of ones addressed by groups doing human rights budget work. The challenges facing those who want to tackle these questions include determining the priority given to health or education in the overall budget, and tracking the efficiency of government spending in these sectors—ultimately determining the role played by the government’s budget in the scarcity of health clinics or the inability of parents to send all of their children to school.

Work that looks at the government’s budget as it relates to a specific rights is an exciting area of growth in human rights budget work—exciting because of the work’s potential for arriving at recommendations for targeted interventions that are effective in addressing a problem. A key resource that sets out a process for using budget analysis to address a specific economic and/or social rights issue is Budget Analysis to Advance the Right to Food: “Many a slip…”. While this guide focuses explicitly on the right to food, the process it describes can be used to do budget analysis on issues affecting other rights issues (particularly economic and social rights).

For further information on human rights budget work related to any of the following rights, simply click on the menu to the left:

• Right to food

• Right to health

• Right to education

• Right to work

• Right to housing

• Right to social security