The International Human Rights Internship Program (IHRIP), in collaboration with the International Budget Partnership (IBP), implemented a ten-day West African Regional Learning Program on Human Rights Budget Work in Monrovia, Liberia from July 4th to July 13th, 2011.

 Twenty-three activists from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Cameroon (and one activist from Rwanda) participated in the program.  Governments have a legal obligation to work for the realization of their people’s rights.  Details of those obligations are set forth in a variety of human rights documents and treaties.  Public budgets are mechanisms for raising and allocating public resources, and are often the chief instruments through which governments either comply or fail to comply with their human rights obligations.  Monitoring and analyzing these budgets has the potential to greatly strengthen civil society organizations’ assessments of their government’s compliance with these human rights obligations.  The program, which was highly participatory in its design, included materials on the content of human rights and related government obligations; governments’ budgets and their budget processes; and how to use different monitoring and analysis methodologies to assess the extent to which governments meet their human rights obligations in the way they raise, allocate and spend the budget.