Protection of Fundamental Rights
We strive to guarantee people a full, dignified and just life with respect for their rights. We adopt an approach based on Human Rights protection and community participation.
We want a fairer and more sustainable world for all and therefore work every day to overcome the causes and consequences of inequality, helping people and communities in need to find the right solutions to problems.
ActionAid believes that without ending the conditions of marginalisation and oppression in which many women live, the results of the fight against poverty will be illusory.
We implement our projects to tackle the conditions of inequality, abuse, violence and prejudice that prevent women from determining their own lives and the development of their communities.
We work so that girls, girls and women can increase their confidence in their abilities in a process of empowerment that starts with the awareness that they have inviolable rights.
We support women’s groups and movements so that their demands can be transformed into appropriate legislative and legal instruments. ActionAid works by encouraging women’s leadership in public institutions to achieve concrete changes in legislation where adequate protections are still lacking.
We run awareness-raising campaigns against prejudice that leads to discrimination, for equal treatment in the workplace and access to education, land and civil rights.
The right to food is so important that it was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as early as 1948.
More than half of those suffering from hunger are located in Asia, but serious problems of food insecurity and malnutrition also persist in Africa and Latin America.
Hunger stems from the inability of men and women to have access to resources to produce enough food for their survival or to earn enough money to buy it.
Yet the world has enough resources to feed the current population: so why is hunger still a daily reality for millions of people.
For ActionAid, hunger is the “product” of improper choices by companies, governments and international organisations, as well as a lack of political will. Harmful policies, which consider food a mere market product and not a right, mean that the hungriest and the poorest are, incredibly, farmers and agricultural workers.
To tackle this situation effectively we must: remove existing inequalities relating to the control of land, water, pastures, forests and seeds; counteract violations of the rights of farmers and workers; ask for more public investment in agriculture and rural development.
Worldwide, there are about 750 million adults who can neither read nor write. Most of them, about two thirds of the total, are women. But illiteracy is a problem that does not spare boys and girls either. It is estimated that, worldwide, some 617 million children and adolescents cannot read, write or perform the most basic mathematical operations despite the fact that two thirds of them attend school.
Education is a fundamental right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and an important tool in the fight against poverty.
In many countries: elementary school is too expensive for poor people; quality of education is poor due to a lack of trained teachers; and in many communities schools are not accessible because too far away.
ActionAid believes that poverty and illiteracy are closely linked and that access to education is essential for eradicating poverty and for the full exercise of other rights: with an education, people are more likely to find work, participate in their communities, claim the rights they are denied and work for the change they need.
