The Human Rights Measurement Initiative (HRMI) is a non-profit organisation primarily housed in Wellington, New Zealand. [1] It was established in 2016 by Anne-Marie Brook, K. Chad Clay, and Susan Randolph: experts in human rights and economics. [2] These founders noticed a gap in easily accessible and understandable human rights data, and HRMI is working to fill that gap. They produce a free, easy-to-access database of metrics, summarizing human rights performance in countries around the world. They believe that with a good set of measures, it will be easier to improve human rights around the world. [1]
HRMI currently measures a total of 13 human rights, including Quality of Life Rights, Safety from the State Rights, and Empowerment Rights. They aim to continuously expand their measurement by producing metrics that cover the full range of rights embodied in international law, particularly the collection of international treaties known as the International Bill of Human Rights. [1]
The Human Rights Measurement Initiative's approach to measuring civil and political rights is unique to the human rights field. They rely on a peer-reviewed methodology drawing on a multilingual survey of human rights experts from around the world. This approach works to solve the difficulty of measuring civil and political rights by getting information directly from the human rights researchers and practitioners who are monitoring events in each country. [3] Their economic and social rights data comes from the Social and Economic Rights Fulfillment (SERF) Index, developed by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Terra Lawson-Remer, and Susan Randolph. In 2019, their methodology was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. This data is constructed from internationally comparable, publicly available, objective data, such as statistics on infant mortality and school enrollment. [4]
HRMI's database of metrics can be found and explored using the Rights Tracker. This tool acts as an easily navigable and understandable way to observe their data. Using the Rights Tracker, one can explore performance for individual countries, rights, or specific people groups at risk for having their rights violated.
HRMI data has been cited in the media by publications including The Guardian [5] and Al Jazeera. [6] Additionally, HRMI's data has been used by various academic publications, advocacy and government reports, human rights institutes, and more. [7]
Income inequality metrics or income distribution metrics are used by social scientists to measure the distribution of income and economic inequality among the participants in a particular economy, such as that of a specific country or of the world in general. While different theories may try to explain how income inequality comes about, income inequality metrics simply provide a system of measurement used to determine the dispersion of incomes. The concept of inequality is distinct from poverty and fairness.
The right to work is the concept that people have a human right to work, or to engage in productive employment, and should not be prevented from doing so. The right to work, enshrined in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is recognized in international human-rights law through its inclusion in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, where the right to work emphasizes economic, social and cultural development.
Gross National Happiness, sometimes called Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH), is a philosophy that guides the government of Bhutan. It includes an index which is used to measure the collective happiness and well-being of a population. Gross National Happiness Index is instituted as the goal of the government of Bhutan in the Constitution of Bhutan, enacted on 18 July 2008.
Education in Costa Rica is divided in 3 cycles: pre-education, primary education, and secondary school, which leads to higher education. School year starts between the second and third week of February, stops at the last week of June, it continues again between the third and fourth week of July and finishes between the last week of November and the second week of December. Preschool and basic education are free to the public. Elementary and secondary school are both divided in two cycles. Since 1869, education is free and compulsory.
Freedom in the World is a yearly survey and report by the U.S.-based non-governmental organization Freedom House that measures the degree of civil liberties and political rights in every nation and significant related and disputed territories around the world.
Poverty is measured in different ways by different bodies, both governmental and nongovernmental. Measurements can be absolute, which references a single standard, or relative, which is dependent on context. Poverty is widely understood to be multidimensional, comprising social, natural and economic factors situated within wider socio-political processes.
The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) is an index designed to measure gender equality. GEM is the United Nations Development Programme's attempt to measure the extent of gender inequality across the globe's countries, based on estimates of women's relative economic income, participation in high-paying positions with economic power, and access to professional and parliamentary positions. It was introduced at the same time as the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) but measures topics like empowerment that are not covered by that index. Since it was first adopted, the GEM has been employed in several academic studies related to empowerment as a reliable metric for comparing gender empowerment across different countries. It has also faced some harsh criticisms, and many alterations and alternatives have been proposed.
During Alfredo Stroessner Mattiauda’s presidency (1954–89), education initiatives took a backseat to economic concerns and the task of controlling political adversaries, and teacher salaries fell to extremely low levels. The constitution of 1992 attempted to remedy the long neglect of education. Article 85 of the constitution mandates that 20% of the government budget be designated for educational expenditures. This measure, however, has proven to be impractical and has been largely ignored.
Education in Lesotho has undergone reforms in recent years, meaning that primary education is now free, universal, and compulsory.
Sustainability measurement is a set of frameworks or indicators used to measure how sustainable something is. This includes processes, products, services and businesses. Sustainability is difficult to quantify. It may even be impossible to measure as there is no fixed definition. To measure sustainability, frameworks and indicators consider environmental, social and economic domains. The metrics vary by use case and are still evolving. They include indicators, benchmarks and audits. They include sustainability standards and certification systems like Fairtrade and Organic. They also involve indices and accounting. They can include assessment, appraisal and other reporting systems. The metrics are used over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. For organizations, sustainability measures include corporate sustainability reporting and Triple Bottom Line accounting. For countries, they include estimates of the quality of sustainability governance or quality of life measures, or environmental assessments like the Environmental Sustainability Index and Environmental Performance Index. Some methods let us track sustainable development. These include the UN Human Development Index and ecological footprints.
Health in Chad is suffering due to the country's weak healthcare system. Access to medical services is very limited and the health system struggles with shortage of medical staff, medicines and equipment. In 2018, the UNHCR reported that Chad currently has 615,681 people of concern, including 446,091 refugees and asylum seekers. There is a physician density of 0.04 per 1,000 population and nurse and midwife density of 0.31 per 1,000 population. The life expectancy at birth for people born in Chad, is 53 years for men and 55 years for women (2016). In 2019 Chad ranked as 187 out of 189 countries on the human development index, which places the country as a low human development country.
Canada ranks among the highest in international measurements of civil liberties, quality of life, education levels, gender equality, public services, public security and environmental sustainability. It ranks among the lowest of the most developed countries for housing affordability, healthcare services and foreign direct investment.
Multidimensional Poverty Indices use a range of indicators to calculate a summary poverty figure for a given population, in which a larger figure indicates a higher level of poverty. This figure considers both the proportion of the population that is deemed poor, and the 'breadth' of poverty experienced by these 'poor' households, following the Alkire & Foster 'counting method'. The method was developed following increased criticism of monetary and consumption based poverty measures, seeking to capture the deprivations in non-monetary factors that contribute towards well-being. While there is a standard set of indicators, dimensions, cutoffs and thresholds used for a 'Global MPI', the method is flexible and there are many examples of poverty studies that modify it to best suit their environment. The methodology has been mainly, but not exclusively, applied to developing countries.
The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) is an economic research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, England, that was established in 2007.
Life expectancy at birth in Belarus was 69 for men and 79 for women in 2016.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Vietnam for a variety of crimes.
The Gender Inequality Index (GII) is an index for the measurement of gender disparity that was introduced in the 2010 Human Development Report 20th anniversary edition by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). According to the UNDP, this index is a composite measure to quantify the loss of achievement within a country due to gender inequality. It uses three dimensions to measure opportunity cost: reproductive health, empowerment, and labor market participation. The new index was introduced as an experimental measure to remedy the shortcomings of the previous indicators, the Gender Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), both of which were introduced in the 1995 Human Development Report.
The Social Progress Index (SPI) measures the extent to which countries provide for the social and environmental needs of their citizens. Fifty-four indicators in the areas of basic human needs, foundations of well-being, and opportunity to progress show the relative performance of nations. The index is published by the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative, and is based on the writings of Amartya Sen, Douglass North, and Joseph Stiglitz. The SPI measures the well-being of a society by observing social and environmental outcomes directly rather than the economic factors. The social and environmental factors include wellness, equality, inclusion, sustainability and personal freedom and safety.
Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than US$2.50 purchasing power parity. Uganda has made significant progress in eradicating poverty and achieved the first millennium development goal of halving the number of people in extreme poverty. Uganda was listed as the 9th most successful country in Africa as regards poverty eradication. The percentage of Ugandans living in absolute poverty has been on a substantial decline, and the finance ministry in the country projected that the extreme poverty level will be reduced to 10% in the future. This success has been attributed to the deliberate efforts to combat poverty in the country by numerous national strategies that are explained below.