Despite expanding policy commitments in many poor countries, health care is often a failure at the point of delivery. Lack of information, poor enforcement, and power dynamics prevent those whose rights have been violated from pursuing redress.
In Mozambique, grassroots health advocates work to address this gap between policy and reality by blending approaches known as legal empowerment and social accountability. They raise awareness of health policy, support clients to seek redress for grievances, and facilitate problem-solving dialogues between communities and health facility staff.
In three years we have seen communities begin to overcome a culture of silence. Twenty-one advocates and their clients have achieved redress to over a thousand grievances across 27 health facilities. These cases have resulted in improvements to access, infrastructure, and provider performance.
Aggregate data from cases handled by health advocates provides unique insight into how health policy is working in practice. We draw on that information to advocate for systemic changes that affect the entire country, like better policies for combatting bribery and stronger procedures for responding to grievances.
This article shares the learnings and findings from our preliminary experience with the health advocate approach.
Source: Health and Human Rights Journal, Volume 18, Issue 2, December 2016
Advocacy: Justice and the SDGs is a toolkit is for civil society, activists, and policy practitioners who are working to promote legal empowerment and access to justice.
From now until 2030, governments will be working to achieve the SDGs and Goal 16’s promise to provide “access to justice for all”. The SDGs provide a tactically strong way to advocate for much-needed justice reforms that will benefit the poor, marginalized, and excluded.
This toolkit will teach you everything you need to know to enable you to initiate the creation of a national justice plan for your country. It provides a step by step guide to steer you through the entire process: from broadening your understanding of the SDGs and how they can help your advocacy, to how you can hold your government accountable to the justice commitments it has made.
This toolkit is a complementary resource to the TAP Network Goal 16 Advocacy Toolkit, which provides civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders with guidance on how to engage with their governments and other local, regional or international stakeholders to support the planning, implementation, follow-up and accountability of Goal 16 more broadly.
Some of this toolkit’s key highlights include:
CONTEXT
• Become familiar with the SDGs and learn why legal empowerment and access to justice are essential to their overall success
• Understand how you can use the SDGs to advocate for a national justice plan
• Identify ways you can help hold your government accountable to its
international justice commitments
TOOLS
• Access to Justice Assessment: Identify your country’s key justice issues
• Gap Analysis: Determine what your government is currently doing to address these issues
• Solution Tree: Pinpoint solutions to tackle and resolve these issues
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
• Case studies demonstrating successful advocacy efforts that use the
SDGs to achieve national justice reforms
• Case studies highlighting various strategies CSOs and governments have successfully used to promote legal empowerment and increase access to justice
On April 19 and 20, 2012 in Dhaka, Namati, BRAC, Marg, and the Open Society Justice Initiative held a regional meeting on methods of monitoring and evaluating legal empowerment. The gathering brought together more than 50 people from all over the region, representing grassroots groups, development agencies, governments, and evaluation experts. Namati CEO Vivek Maru began the meeting with a story about Akbar and Birbal, a Mughal emperor and his trusted adviser.
Namati CEO, Vivek Maru, and Rights and Resources Initiative Coordinator, Andy White, argue that community land rights and protection are crucial to sustainable development. As it stands now, these rights are ommitted from the Rio+20 Conference Resolution, putting billions of vulnerable people further at risk.
This paper elaborates new directions in justice reform under the World Bank’s Updated Strategy and Implementation Plan on Strengthening Governance, Tackling Corruption (Updated Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) Strategy.) On March 27, 2012, the World Bank Board of Executive Directors approved an Updated Governance and Anticorruption Strategy. As part of the preparatory process, several companion pieces were developed to inform the Strategy as regards specific areas of governance important to the Bank’s development mandate. This paper, New Directions in Justice Reform, was developed as one such companion piece to the Updated GAC Strategy. The Strategy commits the Bank to putting in place a revised approach to strengthening justice systems, which it defines as a critical element of any country’s institutional system.
New Directions in Justice Reform constitutes the Bank’s first institution-wide approach to justice reform, and as such introduces the revised approach to justice reform to which the Bank is committed under its Updated GAC Strategy.
Vivek Maru and Margaux Hall argue that fines collected for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) could be used to establish a multilateral financing mechanism for the direct legal empowerment of citizens worldwide.
Read the full article here.
This guide from the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda and Namati presents a step-by-step process for communities to secure stronger legal protections for common grazing lands and improve local land governance. The instructions are specifically tailored to the context of customary community grazing lands in northern Uganda, drawing upon LEMU’s experience leading community land protection efforts since 2009.
Community-level environment justice practitioners, or grassroots environment paralegals, use legal empowerment approaches to assist affected communities to seek legal remedies through administrative routes. This handbook is a guide to help practitioners in India use appropriate legal clauses and institutional routes in their work.
The handbook presents scenarios that include problem types, the likely complaints the practitioner could come across, and the legal clauses and institutions through which a remedy could be pursued for those complaints. The scenarios presented in the handbook are illustrative and draw from the several cases currently being piloted for remedies by the enviro-legal coordinators associated with the Centre for Policy Research-Namati Environmental Justice Program.
The handbook is in both English and Hindi.
This resource is also available in Gujarati and Odia.
In northern Uganda, common grazing lands are central to village life. While nominally used for grazing livestock, communities also depend on their grazing lands to collect basic household necessities such as fuel, water, food, building materials for their homes, and traditional medicines. Yet growing population density, increasing land scarcity, weak rule of law, and the 1998 Land Act’s legalization of a land market have created a situation of intense competition for land in northern Uganda. The growing land scarcity has contributed to higher rates of land grabbing, boundary encroachments onto neighbours’ lands, intra- and inter-family land disputes, and rampant appropriation of common lands. As a result of these trends, there is a high rate of tenure insecurity in northern Uganda, a prevalence of intra-community land conflict, and a rapid loss of the common grazing lands that community members rely upon for their subsistence and survival.
To understand how to best address these trends, the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) and the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) set out to investigate how best to support communities to successfully follow legal procedures to formally document and protect their customary land claims. This effort, the Community Land Protection Initiative, was carried out in Oyam District in northern Uganda from 2009 to 2011.
The first study of its kind worldwide, the intervention’s goal was to better understand the type and level of support that communities require to successfully complete community land documentation processes, as well as how to best facilitate intra-community protections for the land rights of women and other vulnerable groups.
The intervention’s primary objectives were to:
To undertake these objectives, LEMU conducted a randomized controlled trial in Oyam District in northern Uganda. As per the study’s design, LEMU randomly selected 20 communities that actively expressed a desire to seek documentation for their community land rights and then randomly assigned these communities to one of four different “legal services” treatment groups: (1) full legal and technical support; (2) paralegal support and monthly legal education; (3) monthly legal education only; and (4) control/minimal information dissemination. As it provided these supports, LEMU observed and recorded each community’s progress through the requisite steps of the Communal Land Association formation and land documentation processes, as set out in Uganda’s Land Act of 1998 (Ch. 227). These steps include:
1. Community land documentation process introduction, including: legal education and awareness raising; and creating an “intermediary group” to coordinate community process.
2. Mapping, boundary harmonization, and demarcation including: mapping the boundaries of the communal lands; negotiating the boundaries of the communal lands; resolving land conflicts; and planting boundary trees along the land’s agreed limits.
3. Drafting a Communal Land Association constitution and land management plan, including: cataloguing all existing community rules, norms, and practices for local land and natural resource management; debating, discussing, and amending these rules to align them with current realities; ensuring that the agreed community rules do not contravene Ugandan law; and adopting a final Communal Land Association constitution and land management plan to govern the lands being documented.
4. Filing an application to become a Communal Land Association and electing officers, including: submitting an application for the formation of a Communal Land Association with the District Registrar; and convening a community meeting attended by the Registrar, at which time the community formally agrees to incorporate as an association and elects three to nine Communal Land Association officers.
5. Formally documenting community lands, including: surveying or taking GPS measurements of the community land; and submitting an application for either a Certificate of Customary Ownership (CCO) or a Freehold Title.
As it supported communities to complete these processes, LEMU noted all obstacles confronted, all intra- and inter-community land conflicts and their resolutions, and all internal community debates and discussions. A pre- and post-service survey of over 600 individuals and more than 100 structured focus group discussions supplemented LEMU’s observations and allowed for quantitative analysis of all short-term impacts. Unfortunately, due to various obstacles, most significantly the lack of a District Registrar for Oyam District, none of the study communities have yet received a freehold title or CCO for their customary lands. Phase II of the Initiative, to be carried out jointly by LEMU and Namati as part of Namati’s Community Land Protection Program, will continue to support the study communities until their lands have been formally documented and protected.
This report details the study communities’ experiences undertaking the land documentation activities and summarizes the initial impacts of these efforts under the following subject headings: conflict resolution and prevention (describing the boundary harmonization and demarcation process); intracommunity governance (describing the Communal Land Association constitution drafting process); and conservation and sustainable natural resource management (describing the land and natural resource management plan drafting process). It then briefly reviews the obstacles confronted and describes conclusions relative to the optimal level of legal intervention necessary to support communities’ successful completion of community land documentation efforts. The report next details findings concerning how best to facilitate intra-community protections for the rights of women and other vulnerable groups during the land documentation process.
The report concludes by setting forth findings and recommendations intended to inform policy dialogue and support the widespread implementation of Uganda’s Land Act 1998. The findings are offered with the understanding that continued research is necessary to determine the long-term social and economic impacts of documenting community land claims, and that continued community engagement is required to understand how to best ensure that documented community lands are fully protected over the long-term.
This video is a recording of a webinar outlining the five-part approach to protecting community land, as detailed in the Community Land Protection Facilitator’s Guide. The webinar was delivered by Rachael Knight, the director of Namati’s community land protection program and one of the guide’s main authors.
The Guide is a step-by-step, practical “how to” manual for grassroots advocates working to help communities protect their customary claims and rights to land and natural resources. The five-part process examines questions such as: “Who is included or excluded when defining a ‘community’?”, “How to resolve longstanding boundary disputes?”, and “How can communities prepare for interactions with potential investors?”
The video recording of the webinar serves as a helpful introduction to the Guide’s purpose, its content, and the possibilities for its application in communities around the world. It is 1 hour and 19 minutes in duration and can be watched below.
The Guide can be downloaded here.