Using Human Rights to Enhance Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health

Overview

Accountability is central to a human rights based approach to health and it can be a powerful tool to improve women’s and children’s health and well-being. Human rights instruments and standards provide a crucial normative and legal foundation to develop and use effective accountability processes and mechanisms for women’s and children’s health. Human rights based accountability combines elements of responsiveness, monitoring, independent review, answerability and remedial action. It includes attention to structural factors that affect women’s and children’s health, including policies, laws and budgets. Thus, it can have far reaching effects in strengthening health systems and transforming the rights discourse into practical health policy and programming tools and into adequate resources for effectively implementing policies and programmes