New Evidence on the Impact of Legal Empowerment
In Kenya, citizens without a national ID card cannot apply for a job, receive a bank loan, or access healthcare. But to obtain basic identification documents, certain ethnic and religious minorities face a discriminatory “vetting” process.
Between 2012 and 2025, paralegals helped 30,000 people navigate the system and secure ID cards. In May 2024, President Ruto pledged to end vetting. It was the first time a Kenyan president publicly acknowledged the unconstitutional nature of this decades-old system. In February 2025, the president followed through by abolishing vetting committees. This was a change few thought was possible when paralegals first started helping discriminated communities to secure IDs in 2012.
These are the kinds of stories featured in Namati’s new report, Power Up: Lessons from Twelve Years of Organizing with Community Paralegals. This publication demonstrates how legal empowerment efforts build power within and across communities.
Drawn from case studies and 95 interviews across three countries, the report is the third in a series of global research from Namati and the Grassroots Justice Network. The series comprises a three-part “handbook” for community organizers around the world to respond safely and effectively to government threats to legal rights.
“Justice defenders around the world are being vilified — simply for standing up for their communities,” said Poorvi Chitalkar of Namati. “We must stand with them.”
These aren’t just theories. They’re tactics that work — even where democracy is fragile.
Explore the full series below.
Power Up: Lessons from Twelve Years of Organizing with Community Paralegals
Democracy depends on people being empowered to defend and exercise their rights. Community paralegals help those facing injustice do just that, even in contexts where the rule of law is tenuous. Understanding and using the law to address immediate injustices while working toward broader systemic change.
Community paralegals start by building rights awareness and legal knowledge among marginalized populations, but their work goes so much further. Increasingly, they have found ways to combine the law with organizing that builds the power of individuals and communities to make the law work for them.
Power Up: Lessons from 12 Years of Organizing With Community Paralegals tracks the evolution of Namati’s legal empowerment approach and shares the empowering lessons generated by community paralegals who have accompanied people and communities taking on dire justice challenges. Through case studies, analysis, and 95 interviews from around the world, this publication demonstrates how legal empowerment efforts build power within and across communities.
The Playbook of Justice
Grassroots justice workers around the world face conditions of rising authoritarianism and closing civic spaces. In response to human rights abusers using strikingly similar tactics (the “playbook of repression”), The Playbook of Justice outlines effective strategies that grassroots justice workers are using to respond. Drawing on roundtable discussions with Network members and insights from across the field, this report demonstrates that the work of grassroots justice workers is essential, not only to counter repression, but to advance a deeper version of democracy, where communities have the power to shape the decisions that affect their lives.
Grassroots Justice: Pathways to Systems Change
Legal empowerment organizations are experimenting with ways to translate grassroots efforts into broader systemic reforms that tackle the underlying causes of injustice. Grassroots Justice: Pathways to Systems Change is a compilation and review of these strategies. It draws on the experience of 30 legal empowerment organizations from 17 countries that are combining a range of legal and political approaches grounded in community organizing to engage with courts, administrative bodies, and legislators to deepen democratic governance and drive concrete systemic change.