Yesterday, I ran into a truly amazing new organization – Namati: Innovations in Legal Empowerment. Frequently here, I have written about the need for a legal empowerment and access to justice movement, and a greater focus on funding programs that provide legal services to the poor, especially community based paralegals and outreach workers.
Namati is exactly the type of organization I have been envisioning, and I am so excited it has been started. Namati is a new international organization that “tests the potential of legal empowerment through innovative interventions and research.” Their work seeks a “better understanding of the impacts of legal empowerment and the most effective mechanisms for achieving them.” Essentially, Namati has been created to foster a new movement for legal empowerment.
One component of cultivating this movement is their online network, called the Global Legal Empowerment Network. This is a much needed network to bring together people involved in legal empowerment and access to justice issues worldwide. I’ve joined, and found it to have great potential to be an excellent forum for connection with likeminded folks, discussion over issues within legal empowerment, and a source of collected valuable research and tools.
Namati’s second goal is to implement innovative legal empowerment interventions in partnership with governments and civil society organizations in a number of countries. Here are some examples of their interventions (from this fact sheet):
- In Sierra Leone, develop a network of community paralegals, based on the model of Timap for Justice, to confront the challenge of scale in the delivery of basic legal aid.
- In Uganda, Liberia, and Mozambique, strengthen the capacity of communities to complete community land titling procedures, protect their land rights, and sustainably manage their natural resources.
But finally, what is “legal empowerment?” According to Namati, it is first, a movement that provides communities with concrete methods of protecting their rights, apart from the “naming and shaming” blame game that many traditional human rights organizations pursue. And second, it is a way for communities to hold their governments and institutions accountable for development outcomes. Legal empowerment helps to create more empowered communities and more accountable governments. According to the same fact sheet:
Legal empowerment programs often combine a small corps of lawyers with a larger frontline of community paralegals who are trained in basic law and tools like mediation, organizing, education, and advocacy. Namati’s CEO Vivek Maru co-founded a paralegal program in Sierra Leone, called Timap for Justice, soon after the end of an 11-year civil war there.
A World Bank assessment found that Timap paralegals often manage to squeeze justice out of a broken system: stop a school master from beating children; negotiate child support payments from a derelict father; persuade the water authority to repair a well. In exceptionally intractable cases, as when a mining company in the southern province damaged six villages’ land and abandoned the region without paying compensation, a tiny corps of lawyers can resort to litigation and higher-level advocacy to obtain a remedy.
I also found this blog post about the founding of Namati and the vision behind the organization to be deeply inspiring. And in particular, the idea that while there is a strong global movement for global health and a conversation around effective models for health care, there is really no such conversation going for legal empowerment and access to justice programs. There are not many guidelines to follow or models proven to be effective. I love that Namati is seeking to foster and grow this new movement, and create a space for valuable discussion and sharing of resources that is much needed. I am excited to see where this fledgling movement goes, and to hopefully be a part of it in the near future.
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