Day three of NomoGaia’s Fundraise-a-Palooza. You guys are holding up brilliantly.

Short and sweet.

What we did: Gave lectures at the American University School of International Service, Waseda University in Tokyo, and CU Law School.

Why it’s cool: Academia has come at business and human rights from the theoretical angle, but increasingly, business and law schools are reaching out for practical knowledge. Mark is co-teaching a class on business and human rights at the University of Denver Sturm School of Law this summer – a practicum presenting real world challenges faced by today’s companies.

These law and business students will become lawyers and business people … if they carry some lessons from NomoGaia’s learning to their next jobs, those may be companies that NomoGaia never needs to assess.

On top of that, academic institutions are building partnerships, hosting dialogs and raising the bar on discussions about business and human rights. One of the Professors Mark met at a workshop on Teaching Business and Human Rights at Columbia Law School will join Kendyl at a congressional briefing on business and human rights next week. The chains link up and the commitments grow stronger.  Huzzah!

There are five days in fundraising week, but there’s only one human rights day per year. What better day to write about fieldwork? We came out of our assessment work with some stories of incredible inspiration. For example, in the face of nation-wide stock-outs, Kayelekera’s HIV programming protected local residents from drug shortages and never ran out of antiretroviral treatment (ART).

We conducted monitoring visits in Tanzania and Malawi, and we took the initial steps to begin an assessment of a fish farm in Chile. We found that the UN was right to define HRIA as “ongoing” … (more on that below) We are publishing a forthcoming paper on longitudinal HRIA using data and insights from Kayelekera, which is the only mine in the world with a half decade of publicly available human rights reporting.

Our findings in Malawi are exposing the unforeseen challenges in assessment, because contextual conditions have become so inadequate that project interventions cannot possibly meet human rights standards. Publishing on this topic has two aims. First to encourage companies to look at their operational contexts in real-time and stay nimble (Paladin did this, to some extent, hiking wages for workers when inflation became impossibly high, and setting a timeline for additional wage reviews based on short- and long-term currency fluctuations). Second, this work may provide companies with a tool for demonstrating to governments, activists and their own communities how they are coping with the changes in human rights conditions.

If you want to know more about the travesty that is Malawi, read on…

If you just want to click here to donate, that’s cool too.

Between 2011 and 2012, Malawi fell off the shooting star it was riding out of poverty. In March 2011, a tsunami hit Japan’s nuclear reactors, causing a nuclear disaster at Fukushima that triggered a global collapse of the uranium market; Kayelekera became a revenue-negative mine.

The following month, President Mutharika evicted the UK envoy from Malawi; the UK revoked US$ 49 million in aid to the country in response, 39% of which funded the public health sector. The African Development Bank, the World Bank, the EU, Germany and Norway also withdrew aid, citing corruption. The corruption scandal coincided with a foreign exchange crisis associated with a poor harvest and low tobacco prices in 2011 that significantly reduced Malawi’s exports.

Without foreign exchange, the country could not purchase fuel, causing public transport costs to increase and side-lining emergency transport throughout the health system. The poor harvest was not met with a decline in grain exports; the state-owned grain marketer offered deflated prices for maize, so farmers opted instead to sell to cross-border traders. An in-country food shortage resulted in wild food inflation. In July 2011, public protests against rising prices and fuel shortages were quashed with live bullets.

President Bingu Wa Mutharika’s troops killed 18 and injured 41 protesters. Reporters were beaten. Grain prices didn’t drop. Throughout the summer of 2011, the economic slowdown was accompanied by stock-outs of essential medicines, including ART (for treating HIV), owing largely to distribution chain problems (compounded by lost aid dollars). In that time, the Global Fund rejected several proposals by the Malawi national AIDS program, which is 90% externally funded. In April 2012 President Mutharika died of a heart attack, months after ousting his vice president in a move to support his brother’s bid to succeed him in office. Mutharika died in a Malawian hospital but his brother’s supporters concealed his death, shipping his corpse to South Africa for “treatment” to buy time for maneuvering to take over the office of president. The plot was exposed, the brother tried with treason, and the ousted vice president, Joyce Banda, installed in office, but currency instability persisted, resulting in inflation rates peaking at nearly 45% in 2012 before slowly declining throughout 2013.

So here we are at the end of 2013, and maize is still 4 times more costly than it should be, the aid dollars Banda managed to secure have slipped through her fingers with the exposure of “Cash Gate” — an enormous corruption scandal I described earlier this year.

This is a note of thanks to our incredible donors. Last week, at the UN Forum, a meeting of 1800 people, NomoGaia was named, thanked and credited for doing the “heavy lifting” in human rights impact assessment.

Our methodology has become a guide for the Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB), the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR), TwentyFifty and others. Our experience, insight and commentary have contributed to the growing understanding of the human rights risks associated with oil sector investment in Myanmar.

At least a dozen people asked me how we’re funded, and I described you, our incredible donors, as the people who move all of our work. Everyone is blown away that it’s you guys, not companies or foundations, that drive what we do.

So, again, THANK YOU. NomoGaia continues to be tiny. We have zero employees, and our annual budget has not yet achieved six figures, but our work is resonating across the globe. It’s taking hold among the people who can change paradigms. It’s incredible, and it’s because of you.

Nomogaia was invited to be a primary presenter at a conference at the prestigious Osterreichische Forschungsstiftung Fur Internaltionale Entwicklung (Austrian Research Foundation for International development (“OFSE”) in Vienna Austria last week. The goal of the gathering was to investigate the usefulness of Human Rights Impact Assessments for development research and policy. The audience included senior representatives of government, finance, NGOs, academia and business. Nomogaia’s Mark Wielga was a featured speaker and commentator.

Human Rights Impact Assessment has a track record of being employed as an analytic tool for government action, primarily trade agreements and welfare programs. These were described by Prof. James Harrison of the University of Warwick, England, a recognized expert on Human Rights Impact Assessment generally. Prof. Harrison also introduced the audience to Nomogaia’s work on private Human Rights Impact Assessments of business activities. He called Nomogaia a “pioneer” and “the leader” in this field.

Mark summarized Nomogaia’s methodology and case studies. He also addressed the possibility of creating a Human rights Impacts Assessment methodology for infrastructure projects. These include highways, pipelines, and telecommunications systems and are particularly important for development. Mark discussed Nomogaia’s analysis of the Disi Water Conveyance system in Jordan as an example.

There were many hours of informed questions and engagement with the attendees. One vital issue vocally supported by Prof. Harrison and Mark Wielga is the need for transparency in the corporate use of Human Rights Impact Assessments. Prof. Harrison called this a potential a dangerous potential “fatal flaw” with the entire current business and human rights framework.

The takeaways verbalized from the attendees include the need for reliable research and analysis of human rights issues using sophisticated methodology, such as Nomogaia’s. Nomogaia’s work was roundly applauded. Many were impressed that such a small organization had accomplished so much. Mark was repeatedly asked where he got “all the funding” that was clearly needed for such a long and elaborate effort. The answer is that, it was due to our devoted volunteers and our generous donors. Speaking of which, none of your donations were used for this conference. OFSE picked up the expenses.

If a great job came up in a region with the highest HIV/TB coinfection rate in the country, and the country had one of the highest TB rates in the world, would you take it? What if it meant sharing a room with 11 strangers and a bed with at least one of them?

What if you were located on the nearest border of a neighboring region, though?

Hello from Kilombero District! Kilombero has no roads to its remote border villages of Uchindile and Kitete, so I spent three hours driving through Mufindi District to get here. The new mothers I have met here delivered their babies in Mufindi District. The engineers who arrived to drill boreholes arrived through Mufindi District. In fact, the only way Kilombero government can access this population, without going through Mufindi, is by a twice-weekly train that runs through the two towns. The train didn’t run until 2012.

This might not be a big deal except for a couple statistics. The HIV prevalence rate in Kilombero is 4%. In Mufindi, it’s 14%. The TB prevalence rates haven’t been published yet, but in Mufindi, over 50% of TB patients are co-infected with HIV, meaning the devastating effects of TB bring patients to swifter, more agonizing ends.

Any project operating in these towns is most likely to consult Kilombero District data for indicators of health (until last year there had never been a doctor in either village). But since these villagers interact predominantly with Mufindi District, Mufindi data is more suitable to local conditions, and Mufindi’s health risks are multiple times greater.

Companies often profess to have little influence over politics and little interest in being involved. There are cases where that’s clearly not the case – such as when tax law is onerous or export duties are unpayable.

Often, however, governments will modify district borders in response to the planned development of a corporate project. Autocratic leaders redistrict projects into their home regions. Where borders are unclear, governments may set arbitrary borders just to create better clarity for a company. These acts have human rights impacts.

Over here, the impacts are mixed. The presence of this forestry project, and the recent boom in forestry throughout the area, has brought attention to these neglected communities for the first time in their existence. It’s not clear that the government would have sent teams to dig boreholes for clean water if industry hadn’t arrived in the area. Likewise, the trains that usually bring partial fulfillments of medical orders brought doctors to both towns last year. But the company’s laborers may be working under false notions of health and safety. The company can (and should) attentively assess and manage health risks, but a corollary action may be to support existing initiatives to redistrict Kitete into Mufindi.