On 22 January, Digni and our Danish sister organization CKU hosted a global online workshop to launch the new Community-Generated Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) Indicator Tool. The workshop gathered more than 130 participants from across the globe, indicating the high level of interest in this kind of tool. .
The aim of the tool is to strengthen FoRB initiatives by providing context-sensitive indicators developed collaboratively with community stakeholders. It is designed to support a deeper understanding of local realities and to better capture meaningful change in the area of Freedom of Religion or Belief.
The tool was developed through a participatory process as part of the joint CKU–Digni FoRB Learning Review conducted by a team of international consultants. This process included focus group discussions with civil society actors, local implementers, and community leaders in several countries. By grounding indicators in lived experiences, the tool enables partners to develop indicators that reflect what progress looks like in specific contexts, defined by the people who actually experience this change.
The Community-Generated FoRB Indicator Tool is particularly relevant for partners seeking to understand and measure change in ways that are relevant and important to communities themselves, while also complementing existing donor and global frameworks. Indira Aslanova from the review team said: “The tool is a structured approach that enables any “community” articulate the everyday signals of progress in FoRB and other related areas”.
During the workshop, participants were introduced to the tool and explored how it can strengthen FoRB initiatives. The sessions demonstrated how the tool can be applied to identify indicators based on stakeholders’ everyday experiences of different aspects of FoRB. Participants also discussed how community-generated FoRB indicators can be integrated into project design as well as monitoring and evaluation frameworks. In addition, the workshop explored the potential role of artificial intelligence in enhancing monitoring and evaluation and supporting indicator development.
The workshop included responses from a number of stakeholders. Dr. Ahmed Shaheed, the former UN Special Rapporteur for FORB, emphasised the uniqeness of this tool as it is firmly grounded in human rights principles, while taking a bottom-up approach, being sensitive to local contexts and taking power dynamics into account.
Both Ambassador Nathalia Feinberg, the Danish Special Representative for FORB, and Liv Kvanvig, Policy Director for Human Rights and Civil Society in Norad, pointed out that the tool is closely aligned with locally led development. Kvanvig stressed that the tool can offer Norad and its partners a practical way to localise FoRB monitoring and strengthen knowledge-based and adaptive programming. The tool can help clarify what change looks like for various rights holders in specific contexts, taking power dynamics, intersectionality and sensitivity into account. Ambassador Feinberg was convinced that the tool will be highly relevant to share within international networks and can strengthen the efforts to promoting FORB.
Lisa Winther in Digni says: “We are really proud of this very timely tool that we believe will be useful for both our and CKUs partners and other acttors running FoRB projects. We also see a great potential for this method to be adapted into other areas of programming as well, to ensure a more localised way of both designing and monitoring projects, empowering local communities and valuing their knowledge. This tool feeds very well into our work on knowledge management and the process of revising our global results framework.”
The tool is published in cooperation with the FoRB Learning platform and can be found on their webpage by clicking on the picture or the link below.
