We are delighted to announce the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation as a new partner to BarefootLaw. The Charles Stewart Mott supports non-profits dedicated to civil society, education, and the environment.
In a project titled “Accelerating Innovations in Access to Justice through Research”, the partnership between the Foundation and BarefootLaw, will, for two years, undertake a grassroots research project to learn about the practices employed for accessing justice in various communities and the results of those practices. The project is designed to demonstrate, through research, that innovation is an accelerator for access to justice in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi.
The project goal is to review the practices in the access to justice space to build and share evidence-based information on innovations that enable access to justice for unconnected and under-served communities.
“The Mott Foundation values the importance of evidence-informed programming, and we are pleased that BarefootLaw is embarking on a journey to document people-centered justice innovations. While there have been many innovations in justice delivery in Africa, we have not yet seen any research highlighting what works and what does not for a people-centered approach. We look forward to the seeing results of the study.”
– Lorenzo Wakefield, Program Officer, CS Mott
Foundation
BarefootLaw subscribes to the notion that to get justice, people must first understand their rights and how they can lawfully obtain them. We make this possible by employing technology to help us provide legal guidance and education to the public. We use the most straightforward (free SMS and call services) to complex systems (Internet-based and Artificial Intelligence) to share legal information and guidance, to help make access to justice a reality for people and their communities, despite their socio-economic situation.
“With this project, BarefootLaw will build the body of knowledge we require in using technology and innovation to make the law ubiquitous and extend justice to the unique needs of every person, especially those in grassroots communities. It is therefore with gratitude that I welcome the CS Mott Foundation to the BarefootLaw family and look forward to the monumental work we are going to do together to make access to justice a reality for all,” Gerald Abila, the BarefootLaw Founder and Executive Director, says.
We thank the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for this support, as it will build on the body of knowledge and accelerate BarefootLaw’s efforts to scale our programs across Uganda and deepen our reach and impact on the most urgently in-need communities. All this while we continue to innovate and build resilience for a future where access to justice is readily available to all – our mission being 50 million Africans by 2030.