Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning | A Guide for NHRIs in the Asia Pacific Module 1: Understanding MEAL Section 1.4. MEAL challenges for an NHRI NHRIs operate in complex and challenging cultural, social, economic, and political contexts. The human rights issues you are working with are many and diverse. Not only does this make it difficult to identify your human rights priorities and work programme, measuring your contribution to improving human rights can involve the following challenges: Human rights can be difficult to define and, as a consequence, developing human rights indicators appropriate for NHRI contexts can be difficult. Good, accurate human rights data is not always available and NHRIs do not always have the ability to analyse existing data with a human rights lens. You are busy responding to human rights violations and don’t have time to monitor, evaluate and learn from your work. Change happens at different rates and it can be difficult to continually monitor and understand change that happens slowly (and sometimes rapidly). You need to manage scarce resources and limited staff capacity so undertaking MEAL is not a priority. You don’t have a culture of MEAL or established MEAL practices within your NHRI. You need to balance donor partner reporting requirements with organisational requirements. Other players are also contributing to your defined outcomes, making it difficult to attribute the impact of your NHRI’s work. You may not have an enforcement mandate, so you are only able to advocate or persuade. Impacting on positive human rights outcomes requires a long-term approach and it is diffcult to see progress in the short to medium-term. The difficulty of such challenges cannot be underestimated. However, as indicated in Section 1.2, the benefits of taking the time to develop and implement a MEAL Framework and process will make it well worthwhile. 16