Candidate Indicators for Monitoring the Right to Education

There has been increasing awareness in recent years that the development of indicators is central to effectively monitoring human rights, particularly economic, social, and cultural rights, and evaluating the performance of countries in implementing these rights. Effectivemonitoring requires the systematic collection and analysis of appropriate data. To determine which data are relevant, it is first necessary to translate the abstract legal norms in which various human rights are framed into operational standards. This process involves conceptualising specific enumerated rights, for example the right to education, and developing standards by which to measure implementation and identify violations of state obligations. These standards or indicators can then provide yardsticks to assess compliance. Human rights indicators offer a tool for the following: making better policies and monitoring progress; identifying the unintended impacts of laws, policies and practices; determining which actors are having an impact on the realisation or non-realisation of rights; revealing whether the obligations of these actors are being met; giving early warning of potential violations so as to enable prompt preventive action; enhancing social consensus on difficult trade-offs required in the face of resource constraints; and exposing issues that had been neglected or silenced (UNDP, 2000, p.89).