What We Learned When We Showed Up
There is a moment; and any organisation that has been through it will recognise, when a project stops being a project and gains a life of its own. You get invested in the need and pain of that community and you would almost do anything to see them overcome it.
For BarefootLaw, that moment came in northern Uganda, in a place called Payibona Tugu.
When most organizations visit an area for the first time, there is an expectation that the audience will be a few tens of people or less. On the day of the first outreach, more than five hundred people came. They came early, on foot because they had heard that we had prepared a community engagement.
That outreach was part of the Legal Empowerment of Women Using Technology and Innovation (LEWUTi) , a two-year project funded by Enabel under the Wehubit Programme. At its heart, it was about dismantling the barriers that have long kept women from reaching justice: distance, cost, cultural silence, a simple lack of knowing what the law says or what it allows. The project focused primarily on Gulu and, over two years, we supported 7,723 women in navigating legal challenges that had, for many, simply felt unreachable.
But statistics only tell so much.
The women we engaged were not passive recipients. They were voices for change. When we created spaces where they could speak, they did not restrict themselves to the neat parameters of the project. They spoke about everything: land, marriage, inheritance, violence, the small daily humiliations that compound over years.
Listening to them changed us. It reshaped our understanding of what access to justice really demands. Above delivering knowledge, it demanded presence, consistency, trust (which we earned over time).
LEWUTi also pushed us to grow in ways we had not fully anticipated. It was our first experience conducting monthly large-scale outreaches with a sustained commitment to returning as opposed to one-off visits. That rhythm built something that programme budgets often overlook: relationships. The BarefootLaw Box that now stands in Paicho is a direct consequence of those early engagements. It did not arrive from nowhere. It grew from the trust that showing up again, and again eventually creates.
And then came COVID-19.
When the government restrictions arrived and our physical sessions were suspended, we faced a choice that many organisations in that moment faced: wait it out, or adapt. We chose to adapt. We turned to the radio with lawyers on air, communities calling in, questions answered in real time, in local languages. It was rough-edged and improvised, and it worked. It showed us that presence does not have to be physical to be real.
That pivot born of necessity, refined through practice quietly became one of the most durable things to emerge from the LEWUTi period. What began as an emergency workaround evolved into virtual outreaches with lawyers training communities, Village Savings and Loans Associations, local leaders, clan elders, even police officers all without anyone needing to travel anywhere. The IVR platform, which had started as a project component, allowed anyone to call and speak to a lawyer in a local language for free. What began as a project component has since become a core part of how we operate. Even today, our toll-free line continues to connect individuals to legal support, extending our reach far beyond physical offices. Long after the funding cycle closed, people are still calling.
That is perhaps the truest measure of whether something has taken root: not whether it survived the reporting period, but whether it outlasted it.
Thirteen years on, many of the things that define BarefootLaw’s DNA today: our community presence, our belief in technology as a genuine tool rather than a gesture, and our commitment to meeting people where they are, can be traced back to LEWUTi. These were lessons we learned, tested and proved during those two years in Gulu. LEWUTi was a period in which we discovered, adapted under real conditions, who we wanted to be.
In many ways, that chapter did not close. It simply helped us evolve to the BarefootLaw we are today – still evolving.
