The Challenge of Defining Impact

People who choose a career in monitoring and evaluation (M&E)—studying the impact of programs—are a special breed. They crave precision, clarity, and logic. They want to see the evidence behind decisions. They are, in short, nerds. I say this with confidence because I’m one of them. (In my wedding vows, I cited research on what makes marriages work. Jury’s still out on whether that was a good idea, but the marriage is thriving—perhaps just correlation.)

This precision-driven mindset leads to debates over terminology, definitions, and boundaries. Outcomes are different from impacts. Impacts are different from goals. And so on.

These debates surface in organizations’ attempts to categorize ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ beneficiaries—people who ‘benefit’ from an intervention in different ways. The intention behind this classification is good: donors want to understand the reach and significance of a program. But what does “direct benefit” really mean? Does it measure the degree of benefit? Or how closely someone interacts with program activities? Despite its well-intentioned origins, this terminology often confuses more than it clarifies.

Namati’s Approach to Defining Impact

Namati takes a different approach.

First, we avoid vague terms like “direct” and “indirect” beneficiaries. Instead, we talk about meaningful improvements in people’s lives. If a change is meaningful to a community, it matters to us.

Second, we avoid the term “beneficiaries,” which implies that an outside entity bestows benefits on a passive community. Communities are agents of change. Namati’s paralegals don’t simply provide assistance; they work alongside communities, helping them assert their rights and voice their priorities. Communities define what a meaningful resolution looks like and take action—collecting evidence, filing complaints, and engaging government officials—to achieve it.

How Do We Count People Whose Lives Meaningfully Improved?

Over the past year, we’ve refined our approach to identifying who should be counted in this group. Before diving into those changes, here are some examples of how we traditionally assess impact:

• Land, Climate, and Environmental Justice: When communities establish stronger, more inclusive land governance, the entire community benefits from clearer rules and more secure tenure. In cases of environmental harm, if a company stops polluting a river, we count not just the immediate community but also potentially affected downstream communities.
• Citizenship Rights Cases: When individuals secure essential identity documents after facing discriminatory vetting processes, we count both the person receiving the ID and their immediate next of kin, who also benefit from access to employment, education, and social services.

How Our Approach Has Evolved

Recently, we made two key changes to how we calculate whose lives meaningfully improved, recognizing that justice solutions often create ripple effects beyond those directly involved.

1. Health Justice in Mozambique
Our advocates work with patients to address systemic breakdowns in healthcare delivery, tackling issues like discrimination, lack of privacy for stigmatized illnesses, and medication shortages. Until recently, we counted only those who sought care at facilities where advocates were active, estimating this number based on a small percentage of the surrounding population.

We’ve since realized that better, more dignified healthcare benefits an entire community, not just those who visit the facility. Access to improved care leads to longer life expectancy and better health outcomes. As a result, we now include the total catchment area population in our calculations.

2. Fair Carbon Deals and Land Rights in Kenya
Fair Carbon Deals and Land Rights in Kenya
Previously, we counted impact only when communities successfully negotiated fair lease agreements with companies. But there are meaningful milestones along the way.

For example, in Kenya, 27 communities engaging with the Northern Kenya Rangelands Carbon Project secured access to the agreement that governs the project, which is the world’s largest soil-based carbon project, spanning 1.9 million hectares. Gaining access to this agreement required persistence and creativity. The ability to access critical information about their own land was a victory in itself, and moving forward, we will count milestones like this as meaningful improvements in community justice.

A Commitment to Transparency

With this post, we aim to provide more transparency into how we measure one key aspect of Namati’s impact: grassroots justice solutions. In the future, we hope to share more about how we document and assess systemic change and efforts to build community power.

If you’re still reading, congratulations—you may be an M&E nerd. We’d love to discuss and exchange ideas on how best to understand and document change. Feel free to reach out to me at michaelzanchelli@namati.org with your reflections, ideas, or even new research citations on what makes a marriage work.

The post How Namati Measures Impact from Grassroots Justice Solutions appeared first on Namati.

Across the world, justice defenders are facing common challenges such as structural inequality and exclusion, shrinking civic spaces, and rapidly eroding public accountability. The learning agenda for legal empowerment, convened by Namati and the Legal Empowerment Network, and supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, is a collective effort to identify what approaches work to uphold human rights in the face of these challenges, and to grow the global movement for justice. Eleven action research projects across 16 countries are undertaking projects on a variety of issue areas, from refugee rights to police abuse, urban poverty, land rights, and more. These projects will test new approaches and generate powerful insights on how legal empowerment strategies can build community power, increase participation of marginalized groups in decision-making, and generate systemic change.

From March 20 to 24, 2023 learning agenda participants from across the world will be gathering in Nairobi. Over five days, the group will share insights about the different strategies that they are using to build community power and drive systems change. They will share the practical strategies that they are using, workshop live challenges and identify common themes for collective reflection and exchange. They will explore various themes that cut across the different issue areas and contexts they work in. For example, the ways in which they engage the State, the strategies they use to increase participation of marginalized groups in decision-making, and how they combine law and organizing to build community power. To ground these discussions in a practical way, participants will visit the work of local legal empowerment organizations in Kenya. Most importantly, this in-person time will help create closer relationships among participants and will generate solidarity and excitement to power their ongoing work together!

The shared foundations we lay at the global convening will guide deeper reflection and exchange on common themes for the rest of the year and beyond. We look forward to sharing the emerging insights that emerge from this collective learning effort.

Stay tuned for reflections and photos from the global convening!

The post The First In-Person Convening of the Learning Agenda for Legal Empowerment appeared first on Namati.

This blog discusses emerging findings from a research into access to justice which confirm a long-held view that paralegals support social cohesion and help fill gaps in Sierra Leone’s justice system. These findings are from a three-country research effort, supported by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa and the International Development and Research Centre of Canada that is assessing and comparing the cost and benefits of different community-based justice services. Given Sierra Leone’s recent history, the study’s findings will be particularly relevant for policy making on access to justice and peace-building.

In 2003 the trial run of a paralegal program in Sierra Leone took off. This wholly civil society effort was meant to explore alternative methods of justice delivery in the rural areas of a country just beginning to recover from a traumatic decade of conflict, caused in part by a corrupt justice system. This experiment was inspired by experiences from elsewhere, particularly South Africa, where many decades earlier, paralegals provided justice services for blacks caught in the crosshairs of apartheid laws, as well as some very practical considerations. As part of the experiment, paralegals provided legal advice, information and representation on a range of civil and criminal justice matters.

Courts and police stations in rural areas had been destroyed during the war and the number of lawyers in the country was minuscule and concentrated in the capital, Freetown. Even before the onset of conflict, these justice institutions were highly problematic. The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found for instance that there was no meaningful access to justice for most Sierra Leoneans – the police and judiciary were in effect instruments of oppression in the hands of an abusive executive. Against this backdrop of historical mistrust, how does a country address the critical need of access to justice at the community level?

Enter community paralegals

What began as a question has now morphed into a major national response to the many and varying justice needs of rural communities. The design of the Legal Aid Act of 2011 was largely informed by the paralegal experimentation which started in 2003. The law formally recognizes paralegals as justice service providers within a mixed system of civil and criminal legal aid. These paralegals use a variety of tools to tackle basic justice problems. They mediate, negotiate, navigate institutions, provide information, organize communities to take collective action and provide legal education.

With the number of accredited paralegal organizations across the country well below the optimal requirement, the ambitious aim of the legal aid act to embed a paralegal in all of the country’s 190 chiefdoms is far from being realized. However, in places where they operate, paralegal organizations are providing communities with a menu of dispute–resolution opportunities not seen before 2003 – and community members, previously regarded as powerless and at the mercy of oppressive justice delivery structures, are increasingly drawing on these organizations and other entities, in ways that manifest their agency, in the process of making rational choices.

The Centre for Alternative Policy Research and Innovation (CAPRI) – Sierra Leone, is part of the three-year research effort involving researchers in Sierra Leone, Kenya and South Africa that is assessing and comparing the cost and benefits of different community-based justice services, as well as shedding more light on this phenomenon. This multi–country study was commissioned in 2018 on the back of a request by the African Centre of Excellence and Global Empowerment Network, a coalition of African civil society organizations interested in learning more about legal empowerment, the contribution of paralegals to community justice delivery, as well as gaps between law and legal services.

The Sierra Leone study focuses on paralegal interventions in specific areas of justice service delivery, namely family law, land, property and tenancy. While the study’s primary aim is to uncover, through quantitative and qualitative methods the social and economic costs and benefits of providing and seeking justice via the paralegal mechanism for organizations and clients, it aims to assess other issues as well. These include the impact of gender and anti-discriminatory practices on costs, benefits and outcomes of community justice services as well as the role of technology in the provision of community justice services. Seven paralegal organizations and the country’s Legal Aid Board are participating in the study.

Emerging findings: forum shopping and communities’ use of paralegals to preserve relationships

Some of the initial findings of the study make interesting reading. One in particular stands out. It supports the view that the paralegal methodology supports social cohesion in the process of resolving disputes. Focus group discussants across the country reveal crucial dynamics in the use of paralegals to resolve justice problems. Paralegal organizations, they observe, prioritize “the need to restore or solidify relationships, over determining who is right or wrong. This is in sharp contrast to the adversarial approach and binary outcome that is prevalent at the Local Court, Magistrate Court or police station. This nuanced understanding of the approach and outcomes available at the different dispute resolvers in the community has influenced community members’ choice of dispute resolution forum. The findings identify a number of considerations influencing forum shopping. These include the need to preserve or terminate a relationship and the desire to punish the offender or obtain immediate restitution, in addition to cost, time and accessibility of legal service.

If the service user intends to preserve the relationship with the other party to the dispute, they will normally approach a paralegal organization instead of the court or police. If they do not, the adversarial approach of the court and police come in handy. For example, a woman whose husband has reneged on his responsibility to take care of his family, is more likely to choose a paralegal organization if she wants to save the relationship so that they can live as a family. On the other hand, if she only desires to get the man to fulfill his financial obligations, and has no interest in the relationship, she will go to the police or the Local Court.

In certain types of cases such as debt or land dispute, initial findings suggest that disputants prefer directing their complaints to the police or local courts instead of  paralegal organizations. In these types of cases the desire to preserve relationships does not appear to be a priority for complaining parties. Research participants’ perception of the police and courts’ ability to deliver what they consider as binding, enforceable and sometimes punitive outcomes make them a more attractive avenue than paralegals for debt or land disputes. This does not mean however that paralegal organizations do not help communities resolve debt or land issues. In fact, the dockets of the participating paralegal organizations show that a significant number of the cases they handle relate to land and debt issues, although the overall majority of cases relate to family law.

Conclusion

While additional data collection and holistic analysis of the data may be required to form definitive conclusions on the other research questions of the study, it is clear from the initial analysis of the data that the availability of a range of dispute resolution mechanisms has provided more options for people in rural communities to choose from depending on their specific needs. On this front, the country has come a long way indeed since 2003. By self-consciously opting to use paralegals to preserve relationships during disputes, communities in rural Sierra Leone surface crucial questions about the goals and design of the country’s justice system. Is the adversarial approach relevant for all kinds of disputes and should it remain the most dominant dispute–resolution model? How can the right balance between the adversarial and alternative dispute models be achieved? As paralegal programs continue to spread, more evidence for such a determination will be generated but it will require studies like this to collate, analyze and provide some answers. It is hoped that this study’s additional findings will provide further guidance, including on more administrative questions of cost, and best ways to expand justice for all.

The authors are part of the Sierra Leone component of the three-country research being conducted by the Centre for Alternative Policy Research and Innovation (CAPRI).

The post Paralegals, community agency and access to justice in Sierra Leone appeared first on Namati.

As countries respond to the pandemic, governments are asking for more powers and more funds. Restrictions are tightening, not only on freedom of movement, but also on freedom of information and freedom of expression. The security sector—police and military—are increasingly engaged in the enforcement of lockdowns, quarantines, and other government actions.

Is the pandemic being used as justification to entrench policies that constrict civic space? Is the crisis aggravating the human rights situation in many countries?

On Wednesday, June 10th, 2020, at 9am ET / 1pm GMT, members of the Legal Empowerment Network, CIVICUS, and the Justice For All campaign will host a virtual roundtable discussion on how grassroots justice groups can respond to the challenges of constricting civic space and increasing human rights violations during the pandemic.

Join us for a discussion with leading network members as we tackle questions such as:

• How do government responses affect the fundamental freedoms of association, assembly, and expression—of citizens, generally, and civil society, in particular?
• How does this crisis affect citizens’ access to information? Are right to information mechanisms and other accountability measures working during the pandemic?
• How is the human rights situation affected by the increasing role of the police and military in enforcing government actions?

Together, we will explore ways in which legal empowerment groups can contribute to a just response to the COVID-19 pandemic, protect their people and communities, and push back against rights violations and policies that further constrict civic space.

This post was originally sent as a mailer to our subscribers.

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By addressing these needs and more, grassroots justice defenders play an essential role in responding to the pandemic. But adapting to the evolving public health emergency—particularly while under quarantine conditions—poses a monumental challenge. Most legal empowerment groups are severely under-resourced and under threat.

We’ve partnered with the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies to produce a new brief for the Justice For All campaign that aims to address these barriers. “Grassroots Justice in a Pandemic: Ensuring a Just Response and Recovery” provides recommendations for policymakers, donors, and multilateral institutions on how to finance and protect grassroots justice defenders during and after the pandemic. Doing so will help the world to mount a just and equitable response to, and recovery from, the global crisis.

In the coming weeks, we will strengthen these recommendations with concrete examples submitted by members of the Legal Empowerment Network through the COVID-19 Justice Challenge. This will help us to seek support that truly reflects the needs of grassroots justice groups around the world.

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That’s what community paralegals do every day. They walk with people towards justice. We are excited to share two resources describing how paralegals work, and how best to support them.

Guide to Organizing and Working with Community-Based Paralegals

This new guide by Namati and MyJustice shows how paralegals equip people to know law, use law, and shape law. It closes with a chapter on how organizations can best support the work of paralegals, including recruitment, payment, and training.

Illustrated with cartoons drawn by a paralegal who’s also an artist, the guide is full of hard-earned, concrete wisdom on questions like: how to facilitate a legal literacy session, how to write an effective complaint letter to an administrative agency, and how to combine multiple cases facing a common blockage into a “mass case.”

Insights and examples in the guide are drawn from ongoing legal empowerment efforts in Myanmar, though these lessons can be applied anywhere.

How to Develop a Community Paralegal Program – An Interactive Guide

This first-of-its-kind online guide offers a curated set of resources for anyone who wants to design or improve community-based paralegal programs. The guide brings together over 100 text and multimedia resources gathered from across the Legal Empowerment Network.

Drawing from grassroots experience and research, these resources offer guidance on vital, practical questions, including: why knowledge of local context is crucial to start a community-based paralegal program; how to use legal empowerment across issues such as land, gender, criminal justice, and public health; and how to fundraise to sustain these efforts.

If you put into practice something you learn from one of these resources, or if you have an idea for how to improve them, we’d love to hear from you.

Learning from each other is part of how we build our movement, part of how we walk together towards justice.

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In September 2018, Myanmar’s parliament, led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party, passed an amendment to the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin (VFV) Lands Management Law, requiring anyone occupying land classified as “vacant, fallow, or virgin” to apply for 30-year land-use permit to use and occupy their own land. The window to register one’s land was 6-months. If a farmer, for instance, failed to register, another group such as a palm oil company could be awarded the land and the farmer could face up to two years in prison for trespassing.

Most of the lands classified as VFV are in ethnic rural areas, totaling about 30% of the land mass of the country. The law’s purported aim is to put unused land into more productive use, but much of the lands classified as vacant are in fact not. Some are forests which communities use for food, firewood, and water. Others are pasture lands where animals are brought to graze, and farmlands where individuals and families grow their crops.

Under the amendment, lands used under customary tenure are excluded from the VFV classification, but the law does not provide a definition of customary land or any procedure by which communities can register their land as customary.

With its wide and vague reach, the law throws open the gates to displacement and criminalization for an estimated 10 million people. Given that most VFV land is used by ethnic minorities, many of whom cannot read, write, or speak Burmese, there was particular concern that word of the law and its terms would not reach those who depend on land for their survival, and who the law would directly impact.

In February, one month before the registration window closed, Namati conducted a survey to record a snapshot of the legal awareness of communities directly affected by the law.

The results were startling.

• Most farmers were unaware of the VFV law and the new amendment – 72% respondents did not know the substance of the law and only 3% could be considered knowledgeable about the law. Only 1% of farmers were aware that customary land is excluded from the definition of VFV land.

• Farmers did not know the time constraints imposed by the law – only 9% of farmers surveyed were aware the 6-month grace period to apply for their land.

• Farmers did not understand the process for registration – just 16 % of respondents had started to prepare for registration and not one had applied.

• Farmers find the implication that their land is seen as VFV and they only qualify for a concession insulting – 27% of respondents responded that they will not apply for VFV registration because they do not consider their land as VFV. Namati’s interviewers also repeatedly heard from farmers that it is insulting to have to request a 30-year concession on their own land which they feel is theirs.

The law’s short registration window was compounded by the absence of a strong, widespread, and multilingual public awareness campaign that informed millions of people potentially impacted by the law of the steps they should take to safeguard their lands and livelihoods.

Evictions have already begun, and government officials and palm oil conglomerates have used the law to strip smallholder farmers of their lands and sue them for trespassing. The worst is yet to come.

The law and its enactment have been at best vacant of any notion of justice, human rights, and peace. Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party must immediately reverse course on the VFV amendment. The lives and livelihoods of millions hang in the balance.

Access an infographic capturing data from the survey in English and Burmese here.

The post Land Law Threatens to Displace and Criminalize Millions in Myanmar appeared first on Namati.

Our recent survey of farmers in affected areas reveals that most people have never even heard of the law that may pull the land from under their feet. The Op-ed calls on Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy Party to immediately reverses course for the sake of justice, human rights, and peace.

The post OPINION: Myanmar is confiscating land that people depend on appeared first on Namati.

We still have a chance to change that.

This week, the Task Force on Justice released one of the strongest endorsements of legal empowerment in any international document in history.

The Task Force, made up of governments, international organizations, civil society, and the private sector, came together to determine how countries can shift from justice for the few to justice for all by 2030.

As one of the civil society representatives on the Task Force, Namati’s CEO, Vivek Maru, goal was to sound the message of our movement: that progress towards justice requires giving people the power to know and exercise their rights.

The report doesn’t tiptoe around legal empowerment but rather embraces it as crucial to the achievement of the SDGs. “Legal empowerment helps people understand and use the law,” the Task Force finds. “It enables them to recognize legal problems when they arise and equips them with the skills and confidence to take action.”

Legal empowerment is essential not just for resolving individual disputes, but for “challeng[ing] powerful business and state interests” and “tackling the root causes of collective injustices.”

The report acknowledges that civil society has “a vital role to play in helping build trust in justice systems, by bringing justice closer to the people” and highlights the funding and protection challenges that stymie our community’s efforts.

The Task Force “supports the demand of the Justice For All campaign” and underscores that achieving the promise of the SDGs requires “recognizing grassroots justice defenders, financing them in ways that respect their independence, and protecting them from violence and coercion.”

The time is now to build long-term momentum. Use the Justice For All Action Pack to share the report’s recommendations with your government and highlight how civil society and government can work together to implement them.

Tap into the global energy around SDG16. At two moments in this Year of Justice — the High-level Political Forum and the UN General Assembly — governments will report for the first time on the progress they’ve made in delivering access to justice.

The Task Force report calls for governments to come to these events with concrete country-level commitments. Let’s use this window to shape what those commitments will be.

We cannot afford to have another year slip by without a hard charge towards justice. Our movement is helping to change the current trajectory. It’s high time our governments followed suit.

Download the full report here. 

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