13. Resources The success of the plan will depend to a considerable extent on the availability of resources to support its activities. Providing such resources should be regarded as an investment in social progress. Achievement of the plan’s objectives will yield a genuine and valuable return. In a good plan, the objectives will reflect important societal values. Protecting and promoting human rights, whether in the area of personal security, the administration of justice, prevention of discrimination or the provision of education or health services, will advance the interests of the State and its people in the same way as activity aimed at promoting economic growth or military security. The provision of reasonable resources will thus be seen as a good indication of a government’s commitment to the plan and its human rights objectives. A failure to provide reasonable resources will raise questions about the government’s seriousness and about the credibility of the plan. Of course, governments everywhere are seeking to restrain expenditures, while demands on national budgets are heavy. Securing adequate resources in this climate will not be easy. The approach of the coordinating committee should thus combine rigorous economy, strict accountability, cost-effectiveness and innovation. Resource requirements should be analysed carefully. They should be seen as comprising human and institutional resources as well as financial resources. This may open the way to more productive methods of supplementing resources available to the plan, by giving attention to options additional to the provision of financial support, 13.1 Funding issues and strategies Funds are required in two broad areas of the plan’s operations. One relates to the costs of developing and disseminating the plan and monitoring its implementation. The other relates to the implementation itself. The difference between the two is that the former is new expenditure resulting from the decision to institute a plan and relates to the costs of the coordinating committee, the secretariat, consultations, information materials and so on. These can be called development and monitoring costs. The second area of expenditure covers programme activities of relevant agencies. These can be called programme implementation costs. As they are normal programme activities of the agencies concerned, the agencies’ regular budgets should provide the necessary funds. The funds should not come out of the government’s allocation for management of the plan. It may well be that some programme activities involve new expenditure in the sense that funding for these specific purposes has not been allocated in the past. However, the appropriate approach should be that agencies ought to have funded these activities in the past, in that they are of core importance to the agencies concerned, but that they have simply been overlooked or neglected. Where funding has to be found from within an agency’s budget, there will be a need for prioritization, compromise and reallocation of resources to ensure that the agency’s overall objectives are met. 100