We have human rights scores for around 200 countries. Explore the data on the Rights Tracker.

To learn more about how we produce this data, please see our civil and political rights methodology.

Adding new countries is an intensive process to manage, and it takes an average of around USD50,000 a year for each country – this includes costs like translation, ambassador liaison, research, dissemination of country scores on our Rights Tracker, high levels of cybersecurity, and so on.

If you want support the expansion of HRMI data coverage and/or to produce data in your country or region, read on!

What we need to expand

We are asked almost daily to expand our human rights measurement work to new countries. If you would like us to produce data for your country or region, here’s how we can work together to make that happen.

In short, we plan to expand our ground-breaking civil and political rights measurement work to all countries in the world within a few years, or as soon as funding allows.

There are two ways we can expand to your country. Let’s call them:

Option A: Data only

Option B: Full partnership: data plus advocacy

The difference between the two options is the level of funding needed and the extent of work with in-country partners. The full partnership option seeks a higher funding level that will be split between HRMI and one or more in-country partners. So it costs more than the data only option, but with the benefit that HRMI and the in-country partner will work more closely together to maximise the impact of the resulting data.

Option A: data only

For Option A, there are two things we need to expand our data collection to a new country:

Funding
A key person(s) to become a HRMI Ambassador

Funding

We are a non-profit organisation, funded by grants and donations by people and organisations who see the need for better human rights data.

The cost of a data only expansion is around USD20,000 per country per year. For this, we produce powerful tools – freely available to anyone – to drive change and improvement for the lives of people everywhere.

It’s not practical for us to raise that money country by country – we would spend all our time applying for small grants and reporting on them to funders. We far prefer to expand to a continent or region at a time, as we have with the Pacific region – 21 countries at once in that case.

This approach also has the advantage of meaning that your country will be able to compare itself to its closest neighbours – which can give an extra incentive to governments to improve.

Do you have ideas on who in your region would sponsor our expansion to a group of five or more countries, or an entire region? If you don’t know who to approach, perhaps we can work together. It’s more powerful for funders to hear from you that you need our data, than for us to tell them our work is useful. We can be contacted here.

Alternately, you can help use continue to create life changing data by making a donation.

HRMI Ambassador

In each country where we run the annual expert survey, we work with a local human rights worker, our HRMI Ambassador, who helps connect us to a diverse range of knowledgeable people who can be survey respondents.

It’s a voluntary role that takes 1-2 hours a week for just a few months of the year. These amazing people make a huge difference to our ability to produce high quality data. The Ambassador needs to liaise with the HRMI team (so in most cases that means they need to speak English), and be well connected in the human rights community for their country.

Click here to find out what it takes to become a HRMI ambassador.

Option B: full partnership

Option B: the full partnership approach requires the same resources as Option A: Funding.

However, to offer full partnership, we also need in-country partners who are equipped to make sure local civil society and journalists can make the most of the new data, to drive change.

In-Country Partners

In many countries so far we have successfully expanded with the Ambassador (a volunteer position) being our only in-country partner.

We would now like to experiment with the full partnership model which will support our data to be used by more people in each country that participates.

The full partnership model makes particular sense for countries that are particularly large (like India), complex (like Palestine & Israel), or both (like China), and in countries where in-country partners are particularly motivated to experiment with new ways of using data to bring about change.

We are still in the early stages of developing the full partnership model: this will involve working with partners to attract funding for both the survey and in-country advocacy projects. Our partners will help recruit potential survey respondents, and also customise communications campaigns to the local context, and make sure the local human rights community can create powerful tools for change using our scores.

The full partnership model is more expensive, but we also expect it to be more effective. If you are a civil society organisation who might want to partner with us to co-apply for funding to embark on this important work together, please get in touch.

Nominate your country

If you would like us to produce more data for your country, please fill in this form to tell us why. This can be confidential, or you can give permission for us to use what you say in funding applications, to help secure funding to expand to your country.