Sustainable Development Goal 16 asks for peace, justice, and strong institutions. We help organizations turn that commitment into practice through advisory support, programme design, and measurement that communities and funders can both understand.
Goal 16 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda commits member states to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, provide access to justice for all, and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions. It is the goal on which most of the other sixteen depend. Where courts are inaccessible, where public spending cannot be traced, and where communities have no route into decisions that affect them, progress on health, education, and livelihoods becomes fragile and reversible.
The difficulty for most organizations is not commitment. It is translation. Goal 16 is written at the level of states and global targets, while the work of a district health authority, a national NGO, or a community mediation council happens at a much smaller scale. ARAC International works in that gap. We help partners identify which SDG 16 targets their work genuinely touches, design programme activities that move those targets, and build measurement that holds up to review by boards, donors, and the communities being served.
Our approach is advisory rather than prescriptive. We do not arrive with a template. We begin by understanding how an institution already works, where its authority actually sits, and which constraints are structural rather than technical. Recommendations that ignore those realities do not survive contact with implementation.
Support for legal aid providers, paralegal networks, and community dispute resolution bodies. We help partners map where people actually go when they have a grievance, and where those pathways break down for women, displaced persons, and rural populations.
Advisory support on transparency practice, complaint handling, and internal oversight. The aim is simple and testable: a person affected by an institution's decision should be able to find out why it was made and how to challenge it.
Structures that bring affected communities into planning rather than consultation after the fact. We help design participation processes that produce usable input and that people are willing to take part in more than once.
A structured read of an organization's policies, programme documents, and reporting against relevant SDG 16 targets and indicators, with a clear statement of where alignment is real, where it is claimed but unsupported, and where it is absent.
Indicator sets that a small team can actually collect, paired with reporting formats suitable for boards and funders. We favour a short list of defensible measures over a long list that no one maintains.
Briefing material, evidence summaries, and position papers for partners engaging national ministries, regional bodies, or multilateral processes. Every claim we help draft is traceable to a source the partner can defend in the room.
We agree what the engagement is for, who will use the output, and what decision it needs to support. Scope is written down before work begins so that both sides can hold it.
Document review, structured interviews, and where appropriate site visits. We record what we found, what we could not verify, and which assumptions the analysis rests on.
Recommendations sequenced by what the organization can carry now, in the next year, and over a longer horizon. Each is tied to the constraint it addresses.
Working sessions with the team who will implement, plus a review point at an agreed interval. Advice that is delivered and then abandoned rarely changes anything.
SDG 16 engagements draw on the wider network ARAC works within. Analytical support and structured assessment methods come through the Quanta Analytica practice. Global development and risk management capability comes through our senior partner, Lladner Business Solutions.
ARAC International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions fund peacebuilding advocacy, technical support to humanitarian partners, and education programmes advancing human rights worldwide.