Community paralegals in Africa are demonstrating how to build local democracy and empower communities.
By Aimee Ongeso & Morgan Hargrave
Credit: Alejandro Ospina
Africa continues to experience both progress and crises of governance. Despite these contradictory developments, Africans still have faith in democracy and continue to defy the odds. Indeed, polls find Africans more favorable towards democracy than their counterparts in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
However, the reality remains that the current supply of democracy is a far cry from Africa’s aspirations, and systems of governance have failed to meet citizens’ expectations of accountability. Despite this discouraging outlook, legal empowerment practitioners on the continent, led by community paralegals, are trying to figure out how to bolster democracy to stand against threats and hold African leaders accountable for the commitments they have made. In addition to helping resolve everyday justice challenges like access to public services and protecting land and the environment from abuse, they are increasingly scaling up the ambitions of their work to include systemic change that can deepen democracy.
Paralegals deliver legal advice and help that results in remedies for people and communities, and in doing so, they see all the cracks and crevices where governance breaks down. In the Grassroots Justice Network, we heard about a variety of concerns when we convened a diverse group of 111 legal empowerment practitioners from all over Africa for a five-week learning journey. We discussed how they can build community power to challenge the status quo and deepen democracy.
People in countries across the continent lack legal protections from environmental harm, gender injustice, and economic deprivation. But even when there are laws on the books, state refusal or inability to implement them leaves communities at a disadvantage. For example, in places like Benin and Senegal, communities suffer at the hands of polluting industries that have the economic and political power to continue operating without concern for the environmental consequences and the health of local populations. These companies are bolstered by the state’s refusal to implement strict regulations to protect the environment and communities.
As Fatoumata Kante from Guinea noted, “Even if conventions include clauses protecting the rights of Indigenous communities, in many countries, there is no legal framework for implementing the content of these conventions.” Paralegals try to fill those gaps to make the law real for the people who need it most.
Legal empowerment practitioners are also able to highlight local structures and systems that perpetuate injustices and thus contribute to the wider system of oppression and the decline of democratic spaces. According to Charbonnel Nodjigoto from Tchad, “The injustices perpetrated at the community level by the community itself are the worst because this impunity at the local level paves the way for bad governments and institutions to flourish.”
For example, women are often subject to oppression from community leaders in the name of tradition and culture in places like Benin, Malawi, Nigeria, Zambia, and Uganda. In Sierra Leone, an unholy alliance of traditional community leaders, mining companies, and state officials has seen communities dispossessed of their land with little to no recourse for justice.
Consequently, people seeking justice have to push for better laws where they don’t exist and better implementation where they do, and they have to pursue that fight at both the local and national levels. It’s a daunting task, especially for those living under oppressive systems unrestricted by democratic governance.
In order to achieve justice, regular people have to be able to make the law work for them. First, they have to understand laws that aren’t written to be accessible. As Hama Yattara, a paralegal from Burkina Faso, noted, “Legislators pride themselves on simply copying and pasting colonial texts, which are for the most part ill-adapted to the African context.”
Next, people have to navigate how the law works in practice, a process that may be accompanied by potential obstacles like entrenched interests, corruption, and repression. And if all else fails, they have to shape the law itself—advocating for changes that address the root causes of the injustice they face.
But there’s hope. Examples abound where communities armed with the knowledge of the law have been able to get things to move in ways that meet their needs. In partnership with local NGO We The People, a cluster of communities in Cross River State, Nigeria, were able to revoke the mining licenses of two companies. Communities in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda have similarly won compensation and protections by getting their political leaders—whether local or national, customary or state-based—to adopt principles like free, prior, and informed consent when it comes to decisions about land and natural resources.
Because the law alone is not enough community paralegals have found a reliable equation for communities seeking justice: (1) embrace the law as something everyone can know, use, and shape; (2) build the collective power needed to successfully do so.
In Africa, the highs and the lows of building community power can teach the world that democracy can be deepened even in the most challenging of contexts.
From years of work, practitioners hold that if they can get a community to come together and agree on what they want, sustain community engagement on an issue, work around unsupportive local leaders, and leverage their resources and strengths to engage in decisions that affect their lives, they can build power and—in turn—deepen democracy.
Paralegals are laser-focused on what power lets communities do. “Community power is the ability of the community to influence change on matters that affect them,” said Daniel Owinga from the Nyando Justice Center in Kenya. That comes with some key prerequisites, though. For one, as Shem Irungu from Kituo Cha Sheria in Kenya points out, the community needs unity: “When I think of community power, I envision a collective strength derived from the unity, cooperation, and shared goals of a group of people within a community.” And since democracy is never a short-term game, communities have to sustain their efforts beyond a single moment. “[An empowered community] is a community that has the tools and capacity to deal with the injustices it faces in the long term,” said Lamine Seck of Natural Justice in Senegal.
Through the work of community paralegals, Africans can tell their remarkable stories of democratic struggle and resilience. Moreover, those paralegals are increasingly coming together to share and compare tactics and overcome the challenges that face justice seekers in Africa and all over the world. Along the way, they have discovered that our efforts to win justice aren’t identical, but they certainly rhyme. We encourage you to join us.
Aimee Ongeso works at the Grassroots Justice Network and Namati. Aimee has over 15 years of experience working on various legal empowerment initiatives in Africa that connect communities facing similar justice challenges, support communities to shape their justice outcomes, foster spaces for deep learning and exchange, and support the development and implementation of policies that center the needs of communities.
Morgan Hargrave works at the Grassroots Justice Network and Namati. Morgan is an organizer, researcher, facilitator, and writer. He lives in the United States with his wife and son.
This article was first published by Open Global Rights. It has been republished with permission. See other blogs in this series here.