8.3.3 Research

Other types of KM activities require long-term planning:

• Internal research programs (either within the organization generally or in specialized units or centres);
• Internal archives or documentation centres that systematically collect and classify data.
• Information management systems to support human rights-based approaches to development and the management and monitoring of socioeconomic data.

With a good system, statisticians or researchers can disaggregate data to identify and address human rights issues, including gender, development, and economic, social and cultural rights issues that otherwise might be hard to grasp. The capacity to identify progress on these issues depends on (1) the existence of socioeconomic data, and (2) access to such data, preferable on a desegregated basis.

In developed countries, NHRIs generally have access to high quality data through national statistical agencies, although relatively few NHRIs avail themselves of such data regularly. In developing countries and countries in transition, on the other hand, it is not always the case that reliable statistical agencies exist. Sometimes the data do exist, but are lodged in various government departments and are, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible.

The best solution in these contexts is to rely on the international community, through UN agencies (especially data in relation to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the World Bank, the OSCE, and to use international indices already in existence (such as the Human Development Index) to compare progress and set benchmarks. NHRIs can compare this data with their own internal statistical information to help it assess whether their own caseload reflects the national situation.