Abstract Information: With humans being the center of focus of global development work, respect for human dignity is a central theme in the field and is an oft-cited concept in the mission, vision, or guiding principles of a wide variety of development and humanitarian organizations. Despite this, human dignity is a somewhat nebulous concept that is loosely defined, with a noticeable lack of frameworks to operationalize the concept in practice. Additionally, measurements for determining if and how the experience of human dignity is affected by actions in the development sector vary depending on context as well as the cultural setting under which human dignity is being explored. This session will describe two distinct projects that are seeking to understand how respect for human dignity is not only defined but measured across sectors and traditions so as to be able to develop evaluation approaches that can be used to better inform humanitarian and development programming. Project #1: With support from the GHR Foundation, the University of Notre Dame has partnered with Catholic Relief Services to catalog the concept empirically related to affirmations of human dignity in the scientific literature, and to subsequently develop, pilot, and validate a suite of mixed methods tools to measure affirmation of human dignity that can be used across programming sectors. In addition to advancing understanding of the role human dignity plays in development, the measures are also intended to encourage projects to explicitly consider and incorporate dignity-related aspects of interventions into program design. Project #2: We examined how international development organizations promote human dignity in dealing with the needy poor in the global South. Being an aid-dependent country because of man-made and nature-induced disasters, South Sudan has received significant international support in recent years. Several international development organizations work in rural areas of South Sudan, supporting the poor to uplift their condition so they can live a dignified life. We examined how people rate their experience working with development organizations for being respectful, giving them choices, addressing individual needs, and treating people equally. We surveyed over 3,400 households in three South Sudan counties and will present the major insights from the data. These insights provide valuable information on how people perceive the practices of development organizations, which may provide feedback to such organizations for improving their courses so that people feel dignified. The goal of these streams of work is to explore how respect for human dignity is not only understood in different contexts but assessed using mixed methods across sectors as well as perspectives to better inform humanitarian and development programming.
Relevance Statement: Few would argue against the fact that a deepened commitment to evaluation by global development actors over the past decade has increased the professionalism and accountability of such work. Evaluation has developed a focus on objective metrics of success, and as such, development work as a whole has followed suit. Nevertheless, extensive experience in the field has revealed that a significant number of practitioners and policy-makers, while overtly supportive of the ideals of evaluation will, behind closed doors, quietly bemoan how evaluation may also be tarnishing the human element from global development work to which they passionately devoted their work life. Humans experience the world subjectively, and so we can only fully comprehend human growth, experiences, self-expression, dignity, and flourishing within development and humanitarian processes by incorporating this information. In better understanding how interventions affect a person’s experience of their human dignity, we will have a better understanding of what interventions not only deliver objective outcomes, but also could be considered dignity-affirming. This will provide a more holistic perspective on the success or failure of different ways of doing development. At a high level, human dignity has been characterized as simultaneously an internal construct ("how I see myself") as well as an external construct ("how others see and treat me") (Mann, 1998). Mann further states that “violations of dignity are pervasive events with potentially devastating negative effects on physical, mental and social well-being” (ibid.) Violations of human dignity have often been linked in the literature to poverty and poor wellbeing. By collaborating and sharing the measures with other stakeholders, we aim to influence development actors to assess affirmation of human dignity together with sectoral outcomes. Ultimately, we envision reaching a stage when humanitarian and development stakeholders routinely measure how participant’s human dignity is perceived and account for human dignity when designing, implementing, and evaluating programs and policies. This will help ensure that development programs and policies support individuals, families and communities to respect and value the inherent dignity in their fellow human beings.
