Programme Overview
Strategic Objective :
By the end of 2013, targeted communities in all of the Dioceses, will be empowered to participate and contribute to governance processes and to claim their rights.
The Governance and Human Rights landscape in Zambia has gone through many changes over the last few years. In the first place, there is an ongoing challenge to fully engage the ordinary citizens in the governance processes at local and national levels and to this effect the Zambian Government has initiated the National Decentralisation Policy. However, the process of implementation of this policy continues to face inordinate delays and this is negatively affecting the manner in which local authorities in particular, provides social services to areas under their jurisdiction. Further, Governance issues such as the Constitution review process are still ongoing – seven years after work was started and there is growing apprehension that the constitutional order will continue to be inadequate for a democratic country like Zambia – which ideally should be seeking ways of advancing different rights and liberties including economic, social and cultural rights.
Some reforms have been instituted and these include the Parliamentary reforms and it is in the interest of the Zambian populace that adequate monitoring of these reforms is conducted by different stakeholders and particularly CSOs. The same applies to the observance of human rights- while Zambia has ratified several human rights conventions; there is still room for enhanced implementation of the different human rights standards. Against this background, Caritas Zambia in its strategic plan, will give due consideration to issues of Governance and Human Rights. Three sub programmes will be implemented in order to achieve the overall strategic objective and these are – Access to Justice and Democracy and Local Governance. These sub programmes are described below and an overview of the operational objectives presented
