Namati was recently featured on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Development Channel Blog. CFR Fellow, Terra Lawson-Remer, identified Namati’s focus on legal empowerment through community-based paralegals as an innovative, sustainable method for economic development and poverty reduction.
According to Lawson-Remer, the “focus on government systems, while critically important, sidesteps the heart and soul of accountable governance—the ability of impacted communities to advocate and organize on their own behalf, to demand that elected officials deliver on promises, and to represent themselves in courts so laws are fairly enforced in practice as well as in theory.” Legal empowerment programs, part of the larger ecosystem of justice reform and development, work from the bottom up to build the knowledge and capacity of communities to act on their own behalf, and hold public institutions and private firms accountable.
Read the entire piece here.
To learn more about legal empowerment programs, click here.