Metagora is a PARIS21 pilot project focusing on methods, tools and frameworks for measuring democracy, human rights and governance. Based on innovative initiatives, it aims at enhancing proper assessment methods. The Metagora Co-ordination Team is part of the PARIS21 Secretariat. It reports to the PARIS21 Steering Committee and to the Metagora Steering Committee of Donors.
Its design is largely based on the operational conclusions of the international conference on "Statistics, Development and Human Rights" (Montreux, Switzerland, 4-8 September 2000), as well as on the results of consultations and international workshops following that conference. For the duration of 24 months (from February 2004), Metagora is financed through voluntary contributions by the European Commission, France, Sweden and Switzerland.
Metagora gathers together North/South leading expertness and is conducted by a multi-disciplinary community of institutions and individuals committed in the implementation of selected activities in different regions of the world. Its work program includes application of pioneering methods to the collection, matching and analysis of sensitive data, implementation of pilot surveys on selected human rights issues, development of data bases, test of indicators and policy-oriented analysis.
Metagora is policy-oriented in scope, multidisciplinary in approach, inclusive and participatory in method. The originality of Metagora in comparison to other existing international initiatives and projects in the field of monitoring human rights and governance resides in its bottom-up approach to contribute to the development of internationally agreed indicators and related measurement methods: Metagora partners all work with tools and methods that are designed for a particular issue in a particular context; however, these tools will be assessed with in view of their capacity to produce policy-relevant results and will thus provide lessons that can be applied in other situations elsewhere in the world.