The Eastern Africa Legal Empowerment Hub: Strengthening community power to address injustices in Eastern and Southern Africa

Like many regions, the ability of people and communities to organize to promote democracy, respect for human rights and justice is backsliding in Eastern and Southern Africa. Administrative efforts to make it more difficult for genuine grassroots organizations to register, seek and find funding and promote democracy and democratic norms freely are increasingly being used across the region. Yet, individuals and groups who have been historically discriminated against, such as Indigenous people, residents of informal settlements, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, refugees, women and children, need protection of the law more than ever.

Little research has been conducted in Eastern and Southern Africa to evaluate and propose strategies that are most effective for communities to organize to promote democracy, justice and respect for human rights. This project will fill that gap, supporting development of a regional knowledge hub for applied research on what collective action strategies are the most effective in Eastern and Southern Africa to advance rights for all, in particular for those most marginalized from the democratic process. It will support strengthened research capacity and generate evidence to document where backsliding exists and collaboratively develop strategies for defending democracy, access to justice and human rights. It will also undertake participatory research on scalable grassroots movement and coalition-building practices. With an emphasis on peer-to-peer and cross-regional learning, the project will collaborate with similar efforts in other regions.

Outputs include comparative case studies, reports, policy briefs, journal articles and multimedia knowledge products like op-eds, blogs and newsletters. This will strengthen movement building while supporting evidence-based advocacy and the scaling of solutions on advancing rights in restrictive contexts.