Community-led monitoring (CLM) plays a vital role in advocating for the rights and well-being of people who use drugs. It relies on our leadership and expertise to increase equity, uphold human rights, and improve accessibility and acceptability of services. We have produced a guide to introduce CLM to our community and to provide resources to support the implementation of and funding for CLM.

This guide was developed to introduce community-led monitoring (CLM) to people who use drugs, to our organisations and networks, and to provide resources to support implementation of and funding for CLM. CLM is a formal methodology which uses “[…] systematic data collection by communities for evidence-based advocacy to improve accountability, governance, and quality of health services.” The core principle of CLM is that it is led and owned by key populations and communities. There are numerous resources to guide people who use drugs and our communities, organisations, and networks on developing funding requests and implementing CLM including good practices, technical processes, confidentiality, and data safeguarding. They are all included in Annex 1 of this guide. The implementation steps are summarised in the CLM Cycle section. Although most of these resources were not developed specifically for people who use drugs, they can be adapted to fit different contexts. People who use drugs and our networks and organisations have been at the forefront of human rights advocacy for a long time. CLM however is not intended to replace ongoing advocacy; it offers an additional advocacy avenue to address longstanding inequity, human rights violations, remove policies and laws that feed stigma and discrimination, and address gaps in access to and quality of health and harm reduction services.