Sylvia Ilahuka | There’s an app for that: Justice tech in Africa
The world over, justice is difficult to access due to socioeconomic disparities and systemic gaps. Justice-oriented civil society efforts have emerged in response, applying technology with great ingenuity to reach those who are prone to falling through the cracks.
Here’s a look at three locally-led African organizations that are bringing the law to the people and breaking new ground as they do so.
In cultures with strong traditions, as are many on the African continent, the justice gap is exacerbated – as it was for one Malawian man experiencing abuse at the hands of his wife. This man had gone to the police many times and been ridiculed for ‘not having control of his woman.’ With nowhere else to turn, he came across a phone number and figured he might as well call: it was The Gender and Justice Unit (GJU) hotline. The brainchild of Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, GJU exists to leverage the law through technology to increase access to justice in Malawi. GJU came about after Chisala, herself a legal scholar, surveyed women in rural and peri-urban Lilongwe to learn what issues they were facing. “GJU’s story begins with wanting to respond to women’s needs,” she describes. Her response to the findings originally took the form of a booklet that simplifies national laws and outlines procedures for accessing legal aid. Chisala eventually realized that, on a continent where the literacy rate is around 70%, disseminating this information in a written format wasn’t quite it – compounded by the reality that the majority of laws on the continent are enshrined in colonial languages, posing an additional barrier.
In 2021, Tanzania passed a bill to translate the nation’s laws into Kiswahili and institute it as the language of the courts. While the process did not reach completion, it signaled a greater recognition of the need for legal information to be linguistically accessible to the public. Beyond language, there are also logistical obstacles to obtaining legal services. Attorney Neema Magimba learned during a law school internship that, for Tanzanians based in rural areas, consulting a lawyer required travelling to the city – which meant pausing one’s economic activity for however long. Magimba asked herself, “Can people from my own community easily access the legal sector that I take pride in being part of?” Sheria Kiganjani (which translates to ‘the law in hand’) came to be in 2018 as Tanzania’s first-ever digital legal platform, co-founded by Magimba. Sheria Kiganjani distributes simplified legal information through offline and online channels. With access to information, citizens become confident about their ability to handle basic legal challenges and employ appropriate dispute resolution mechanisms.
Their Ugandan counterpart, BarefootLaw, provides similar resources born of the inability to be everywhere at once. “When you visit one community, the neighbouring one will then ask you to also come, and so on,” says Michael Kwizera, development director. BarefootLaw was primarily digital to begin with, over ten years ago: they started with an SMS system that fell through due to technical constraints, then moved to Facebook. It was there that they observed men responding to their online content more than women; this triggered a pause to reflect on the engagement disparity and how it could be exacerbating issues behind the screen. Access to information had now transcended literacy and crossed over into digital savvy. Realizing that Page 2 of 2 internet access was predominantly urban, they set up innovative BarefootLaw Boxes in rural areas: shipping containers retrofitted with technology that enables visitors to interface virtually with lawyers stationed hours away in the capital, Kampala. The Boxes are now available in multiple locations across Uganda.
Technology makes it easier to serve many, but with every innovation arises a constraint. For example, cellphone ownership: it may seem basic, but women in rural areas may not have access to one except through their husbands or neighbours, thereby limiting their engagement with legal services. Cellular data costs in Malawi used to be among the most expensive in Africa while nationwide internet penetration remained low; this trend has since been upended, but the Gender and Justice Unit’s toll-free interactive voice response tool EmpowerLine remains valuable. Tools like these deliver information to where the people are; creative formats make for easy understanding. BarefootLaw uses social media and radio to convey legal knowledge via relatable scenarios set in the local Ugandan context. GJU relies heavily on word of mouth for their services to be known, and once received backlash for an advertisement that was interpreted as their services being for women only. In fact, founder Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff says, most callers have been men inquiring about the legalities of matters like inheritance law and child maintenance.
At the intersection of technology and the law, continuous innovation is essential. For BarefootLaw, artificial intelligence (AI) was originally used internally to support the lawyers in their work; now the organization is pioneering with an AI assistant “Winnie”, named after one of their earlier beneficiaries, and advocating for the ethical use of AI and machine learning in access to justice. In a bid to broaden reach and contribute towards organizational sustainability, Sheria Kiganjani collaborates with cellular service titan Vodacom to embed Sheria Kiganjani’s services within the popular M-pesa mobile money app where users pay nominal tiered fees to consult a licensed lawyer (while the main functionalities remain free).
Technology, with all its background complexities, is an effective tool for bringing previously hard-to-access services within reach; it allows for two-way engagement, making it possible for more people to participate in society. And that is, in itself, just.
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