Human rights have now become a means to and end of development. Human rights have not only become relevant to different dimensions of development, but also to the work of the dominant global development institutions; whose policies and programmes continue to shape how national governments attempt to alleviate the myriad challenges of poverty, inequality, disease, war and now the predicament of climate change and other old and nascent forms of human suffering.

A problem at the heart of what is often called rights-based approaches to development is their misunderstanding of the structural crises that have engulfed the African state, which continue to raise questions about whether some adaptation is required to traditional thinking to enable, among other things, new ways of thinking about how human rights should be achieved. This is generally a problem symptomatic of traditional human rights approaches. Not only are traditional human rights approaches rigid, they are also oblivious of historical and contemporary problems, realities and situations.

Although this particular limitation of traditional state-based human rights system has been recognised, the response has been, with negative consequences, to look to the market. The problem is that the nascent market-based approach to human rights gives rise to similar, if not worse, problems that affect the state-based approach, especially its failure to extricate itself from questions of the lack of participation and exclusion of the poor.