Rights beyond rhetoric

By Herman M. Lagon

Development often looks like billboards of expressways, malls, and condominiums. But behind these images are lives that remind us progress cannot be read from GDP charts. A child in Samar eats watery porridge. A fisher in Banate returns with empty nets because trawlers sweep the sea. A teacher in Quezon City stretches her lessons with photocopies because textbooks never arrive. These are not side stories. They are the story. Global Citizenship Education (GCED) and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remind us that true development is not about tall buildings but about dignity that runs deep.

These reflections grew out of my participation in the GCED Online Course of APCEIU under UNESCO, facilitated by Dr. Jeff Plantilla. The course opened doors to voices from many countries, each sharing struggles and dreams that reshaped how I see development, rights, and sustainability. Their stories grounded the theories we studied, turning them into lived realities.

Carlos Bulosan’s Freedom from Want says it best: democracy is hollow if people cannot eat, study, or live in peace. His words sting in a nation where resilience is praised but hunger and job precarity remain. UNICEF’s Progress of Nations sharpened the point years ago: a nation’s success is measured not in stock markets but in children’s survival and mothers’ health. That remains painfully true, with one in three Filipino children still stunted today.

The UN’s Declaration on the Right to Development reframes progress not as a favor but as a right. Yet in Philippine politics, projects are paraded as gifts—bridges, waiting sheds, classrooms tied to names and faces plus scandalous kickbacks. Development is not a gift; it is a duty. Underpaid teachers, empty hospitals, and unprotected barangays are not lapses but rights denied. Corruption, in this light, is not only greed—it is theft of the people’s future.

The Guiding Principles on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights struck me most: poverty is not misfortune but injustice. Too often, it is treated like bad weather. Handouts come, promises follow, but life remains the same. Beyond money, poverty erases dignity. Even tricycle drivers are left out of the very transport policies that govern their survival. Fisherfolk are seldom asked about coastal management. Their silence is systemic. If poverty is a rights violation, then inclusion is non-negotiable.

Hence, the SDGs only make sense when tied to real lives. I see them in four groups. The “Basic Breaths of Life”: no poverty, no hunger, health, and clean water. The “Bridges of Growth”: education, decent work, innovation, and equality. The “Homes for the Future”: sustainable cities, climate action, protection of land and sea. And the “Pillars of Justice”: gender equality, peace, and partnerships. We breathe, we cross, we build, and we lean on justice.

But none of this works without participation. Development cannot be done to people; it must be done with them. India’s gender-responsive budgeting showed how policies shift when women’s voices are heard. In New York, citizens voted on small community projects. Brazil’s Porto Alegre gave the poor water and housing through participatory budgeting—though it also warned us how politics can erode gains. Participation, messy as it is, turns SDGs from slides into lived change.

This responsibility extends to business. PepsiCo’s reckoning with land rights proved that corporations can shift from seeing land as dirt to recognizing it as dignity. Our country knows this struggle well—haciendas in Negros, ancestral domains in Mindanao, reclamation projects in Manila Bay. Our Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act ensures Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, but too often it becomes a box to tick. Respecting rights is the bedrock of trust and long-term success.

GCED teaches us that rights, development, and sustainability cannot be separated. The UN’s 2022 affirmation of the right to a clean and healthy environment gave moral weight to the struggles of families in Leganes, where floods rise yearly, if not monthly, and in Carles and Estancia, where reefs bleach. For them, these rights are not abstract—they are survival. Education anchors this vision. In classrooms, I have seen how young people shift when they realize poverty is structural, not fated. They begin to claim their role as citizens, not just labor in training.

The SDGs give a horizon, but progress is built in relays across time. Filipinos know this rhythm—unfinished revolutions, people power, reforms carried and passed on. The torch today is global. Every decision on education, energy, and equality adds a thread to the world’s fabric. What matters is that we contribute where our gifts and context allow. In the end, development is not about concrete poured but dignity secured. A healthy child, a fisher with rights, a classroom that sparks imagination—these are the milestones that last. GDP may dazzle, but dignity sustains.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.