Scaling access to justice research collaboration
Programs and partnerships
Lead institution(s)
Summary
Globally, the evidence to increase access to justice is sparse, especially compared to other essential services like education and health.Read more
Globally, the evidence to increase access to justice is sparse, especially compared to other essential services like education and health. However, without the ability to access fair justice systems, people are left without a means to resolve grievances, or to protect their legal rights, their livelihoods, their assets, or their family’s physical security. This lack of protection in their day-to-day life leaves them open to abuse. The growing number of legal needs surveys clearly indicates that across countries and regions, legal problems tend to be concentrated in poorer populations, leaving them further vulnerable to social challenges.
From 2005 to 2013, only 1.8% of aid globally was devoted to justice. Much of that support focused on state institutions in a handful of countries, largely omitting front-line and civil society efforts. With the Sustainable Development Goals, the international community has, for the first time, recognized a universal commitment to achieve access to justice. Making that goal a reality will require a stronger evidence base at the national and global levels about how to scale up basic legal services and ensure access to justice for all.
This project takes up that challenge through support to two complementary efforts. The first involves local research institutions in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and South Africa that will lead country case studies to improve understanding of the relative quality, impact, and cost of services and, in turn, the appropriate “bundle” of services to scale. The case studies will focus on legal problems with strong gender dimensions, such as access to justice for spousal and child support cases, and property and tenancy disputes.
The second related effort involves the country research teams meeting at key moments in the research process to share experiences and findings and refine common research tools. A research institution with global expertise will convene the exchanges and support efforts of the individual country teams, with a view to developing a broader set of comparative findings and recommendations that can feed ongoing global debates on scaling access to justice. Taken together, this project aims to develop new tools and catalyze new ways to conduct access to justice research; target key policy openings at the country level to guide access to justice priorities and support; and build recognition of access to justice as a key priority, at both national and global levels.
Research outputs
Access full library of outputs Opens in new tab
The promulgation of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution provided an impetus for enhanced access to justice for Kenyans through use of alternative dispute resolution including traditional mechanisms. Existing research had shown that majority of the population does not use the formal court process to access justice. Thus, the need for more information on the initiatives used to resolve disputes was necessary to not only document them but also learn about their effectiveness and sustainability with a view making recommendations on their suitability for scaling up access to services. It was against this backdrop the project was conceived. Overall, the project sought to contribute towards catalyzing deeper and more sustained efforts, at a national and global level, to scale basic legal services and ensure access to justice for all through the building of new evidence and models of analysis.
Most rural areas are geographically located far away from courts or any justice institution, making it hard for residents to access them. This report analyses relevant literature and sets out the conceptual framework; discusses the obstacles that impede access to justice in Kenya; maps out the nature of disputes and existing dispute resolution initiatives; provides a cost and benefit analysis of the existing access to justice initiatives; and concludes with a summary of the key findings, making recommendations towards enhancing access to justice policies that relate to scaling of existing access to justice initiatives.
This is the final technical report for the Supporting and Synthesizing Community-Based Justice Research
(“Community-Based Justice Research”) project. The CBJR project is an extension of the IDRC’s Understanding the Costs and Benefits of Community-Based Justice Services (“Community Justice”) collection of research projects. This collection includes separate studies led by CBJR project partners in Sierra Leone, Kenya, and South Africa. Each study in this collection is designed and implemented by the respective in-country research team but is similarly centered on gathering country-level insights on the costs and benefits of justice services used at the local level to resolve select civil and family justice problems. Findings from the Community Justice collection of studies inform a final, pan-project, CBJR report.
This brief discusses the structural and financing models used by the ten community advice offices (CAO) located in five South African provinces that participated in this study. An investigation was done during proposal development, and preliminary visits were made to five CAOs to collect anecdotal evidence of the structural and financing model in the CAO sector. Four models were identified: intermediary, stand-alone, law clinic, and umbrella financing models.
This brief presents information on each of the community advice offices (CAO) that participated in the study: the background of the organisation, its location and surroundings, its staffing structure, programmes and activities, challenges, and in some cases, observations made by the research team during preliminary visits to the organisation. Visual documentation was taken at the CAOs during the study.