The programme intends to serve these objectives:
- To train and equip community representatives, human rights and peace activists, gender rights activists, academics and researchers and young professionals working at policy level, with key concepts of human rights and justice especially those of marginalised communities, their link with development processes, and popular development alternatives in order to prepare leaders for the grassroots movements and struggles.
- To acquire a comprehensive knowledge of national social and economic policy regimes in order to empower vulnerable and marginalised communities in their struggle for sustainable livelihood and social and political participation across South Asia.
- To sensitise participants from government or civil society that are engaged in the formulation and implementation of policies about the special needs of the women, Dalits, indigenous communities, specially challenged people, and other marginalised groups in society during the crisis situation such as Tsunami, floods, ethnic conflicts, internal displacement, etc.
- To enhance understanding of the globalisation process, the inherent conflicts in the process, the resistance it provokes, and its impact on women, indigenous people, Dalits, and other marginalised communities and rights scenario in changed circumstances on the model of participatory and dialogic process.
- To intervene in the interface between human rights and humanitarian work for protecting and promoting the rights based agenda of development making the governance democratic, participatory and plural.
- To assess the role of the South Asian governments in the implementation of the goals of SAARC social charter and its dissemination.
- To review governments’ policies in the light of the rights and justice.
- To use the methodology of participatory and decentralised educational processes in a dialogic ‘educational space’ to facilitate the process of building bridges between popular struggles and civil society.
- To enable participants to un/learn and deconstruct their own understanding and belief of the developmental processes and systems and critically engage with them and think of alternative sustainable approaches, which would enhance the sustainability of livelihood and ensure greater social and political participation of marginal communities across South Asia.