You have been clear with the community about your role, powers and functions as an NHRI. Arrange a meeting with key community members to discuss how you could support them to carry out their action plan. You may need to resist the urge to ‘take-over’ or to agree to taking on actions that should belong to the community. On the other hand, you are not about to abandon the community to its own devices. Discuss communication channels between you and the community. • How/when will you check-in with each other? • Who are the respective liaison people? • Would the community be open to informing your NHRI about general human rights issues that may arise, such as for the NHRI’s reporting or policy-making? • Would the community be open to advocate to the NHRI for those who may have human rights complaints? • Would they be open to receiving information from the NHRI? Part of this discussion would be to negotiate time when the community would like you to be involved in their activities. Is there a launch of the action plan you and your NHRI leadership could attend? Are there key, or difficult, meetings the community would like you to be present at such as with a government agency or private company? Would the community like you to facilitate community capacity-building events? As indicated in Figure 10 (A typical distribution of time for a HRCLD activity) the community will require more support in the beginning stages of the action plan being carried out than it will as the community takes ownership of its direction and activities. Your involvement then may be more at a maintenance (responsive) level. 4.2 Community-led monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning (MEAL) The APF has developed a guide on Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) to support NHRIs understand how effectively activities are reaching, or have reached, planned outcomes. This is a downloadable resource and provides practical step-by-step guidelines, tools and resources, aspects of which may be useful for your community. It is important that the community has a plan to: • check regularly to understand how well it is progressing towards achieving its outcomes. (Monitoring) • review progress at specific intervals (usually when an outcome is due to have been reached) to find out well it has achieved its outcomes. (Evaluation) • establish mechanisms to ensure that the community and other relevant people have an opportunity to comment on the progress of the action plan and receive regular progress reports. (Accountability) • reflect on the monitoring and evaluation findings, learn from them, and apply what they have learned to further activity. (Learning) In addition to facilitating the Community’s MEAL Plan you will also, as an NHRI, need to develop your own indicators and MEAL processes with clear outcomes. Developing indicators is discussed above in s3.2. More detailed information can be found in the APF MEAL Guide. APF HRCLD Guide 50