Myanmar today is at a turning point. While transitioning to democracy it faces an array of severe human rights problems. For over 50 years, its people did not experience or learn about democracy and citizenship in terms of rights and responsibilities. As such, there is a danger that reforms will not bring peace, rule of law, and tolerance. This project will promote and protect human rights through education and advocacy, and support activists to mobilize communities to protect everyone's rights.
Most people in Myanmar haven't had opportunities to learn about their rights and ways to exercise them as active citizens and activists. This lack of knowledge and capacity has held back the potential of society to address the numerous human rights challenges across Myanmar, such as repressive laws, abuses by armed groups or the military, unchecked hate speech and misinformation, discrimination of minority groups, and barriers to meaningful participation in the peace process.
With your support, Equality Myanmar will provide training and awareness raising tools for activists and community organizations across Myanmar to help people learn about their rights and democratic methods of holding powerful actors accountable. Our experience has shown that with this support, people become empowered to take actions that protect rights and counter the forces of repression, abuse, and intolerance.
An engaged and empowered civil society is an essential factor in bringing about sustainable change for protecting and promoting human rights. Our project contributes to this end by building a critical mass of awareness and respect for human rights, as well as increasing the skill and agency of activists and community organizations to apply the rights based approach. Each year we train over 1,000 people and dozens of community organizations to be able to protect and promote human rights.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
