Defending Dignity A Manual for National Human Rights Institutions on Monitoring Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Recommended benchmarks are those that come from groups with particular expertise on a topic. This can include experts from within the human rights field, such as special procedures mandate holders, treaty bodies or even NHRIs. They may also include experts from outside the human rights field but from a relevant sector, such as public health, education, economics or water and sanitation. The obvious challenge with recommended benchmarks is that it can sometimes be hard to get buy in from those duty bearers who are expected to meet them. 4.4. WHAT CAN HUMAN RIGHTS INDICATORS AND BENCHMARKS HELP MEASURE? As described in Chapter 3, policy monitoring differs from documenting specific events. It involves mapping trends and patterns in order to better understand a particular situation. Indicators and benchmarks are inherently well suited to this kind of mapping exercise because they provide a standardized unit of measurement that can be analysed according to different human rights norms. Specifically, indicators can be used to measure: • Obligations of result: Outcome indicators can be used to measure the level of enjoyment of a right (e.g. literacy rates relate to education, malnutrition rates to food, disease prevalence rates or mortality rates to health). These types of indicators can be used to measure outcomes in step one of OPERA. • Obligations of conduct: Indicators that quantify inputs and outputs (process indicators under OHCHR’s framework) can help measure the availability, accessibility and quality of goods and services by telling us what goods and services exist, where they are available, how much they cost and who is using them (e.g. indicators like the number of schools, average distance to the nearest school, student-to-teacher ratio, and students’ performance on standardized tests can show how successful efforts to realize the right to education have been). These types of indicators can be used to measure policy efforts in step two of OPERA. Policy effort indicators are essential for measuring whether States are taking appropriate steps towards the realization of ESCR. For example, measuring maternal mortality as an indicator of the right to health does not necessarily reveal the reasons why the rate might be high (or low, for that matter). Is it because there are no any health centres? Is it because the health centres are too expensive? Is it because the quality of care in health centres is very poor? Indicators on policy efforts can help to answer these questions. Further, indicators can measure: • Minimum core obligations: By identifying indicators that relate to the minimum core obligations of a particular right (e.g. primary education as part of the right to education, or maternal health as part of the right to health), it is possible to give greater clarity to the concept of minimum core obligations. • Non-discrimination: By disaggregating indicators according to the prohibited grounds of discrimination, it is possible to identify groups that are not enjoying a right to the same level as the overall population or who are not accessing a necessary good or service. Disaggregating indicators is a particularly important way of uncovering hidden patterns of disadvantage. In particular, because indicators can be disaggregated on the basis of more than one variable, they can also be valuable in understanding how intersecting grounds of discrimination affect people. For example, we might want to look at the literacy rate among older migrant women, or the unemployment rate among people with disabilities in urban areas or the school completion rate of poor girls in rural areas. 46