SARP works in three related areas to assist our members in the defence and promotion of housing and land rights in South Asia.

• Capacity Building and Training ;
• Research and Fact Finding ;
• Advocacy and Networking

We hope to build local and regional NGO/civil society cooperation by creating the opportunity for sharing and coordinating information, providing training and technical assistance to counterparts in South Asia. Our goals are to develop the capacity to form effective housing-rights campaigns at local and regional levels and to provide mutual and reciprocal support throughout the region.

Human rights education - especially related to economic, social and cultural rights, and women's rights - is an intended benefit of each component of the SARP Programme. Our human rights education objective already has led to the design, development, production and delivery of customized training materials, specialized workshops, and distribution of information (electronic and print), publications, legal documents and thematic reports (see Resources and Publications).

SARP has been active at advising, training and materially supporting local housing rights and community-development NGOs to cooperate with the United Nations programme, treaty body sessions and other regional and international human rights and professional forums.

SARP regularly arranges workshops as part of the preparations for parallel reporting to the UN Treaty Bodies, and other national events. This is intended eventually to crystallize into national housing rights movements and campaigns through familiarity and mutual reliance developed initially through the workshops.

As each training experience also embodies a needs assessment, the lessons of each training opportunity give rise to new tools and curriculum materials, contributing to the development of ongoing activities.

We regularly conduct research on housing and land issues in the region. In particular, SARP has been active in research on women's right to adequate housing. Our research creates knowledge, builds solidarity over common issues and develops strategies for multiple methods of housing rights defense and problem solving.

SARP has often organized fact-finding missions as a first step to taking up new cases or supporting national focus campaigns. HLRN fact-finding serves to generate international solidarity, media attention, public awareness and substantive information by investigating claims of housing rights violations.

For more information on our research interests, see the Research page. Also, check out our Publications.

SARP's existing relationships are based on mutual benefit in pursuit of a common objective, usually involving advocacy. These alliances take several forms (such as UN lobbying and the Urgent Action scheme) and they can be temporary or sustained. In the near future, we expect the number of alliances to increase.

We also work to enhance international networking by further introducing SARP organizations into, and engaging them with related international NGO networks, primarily HIC, but also others.