Achieving Justice Globally Starts Locally

Since I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a human rights lawyer. But just as I was about to start my first year of law school at the University of Nairobi, my father was forced into exile, and I—bitterly, resentfully—was forced to follow. We left Kenya and found refuge in the United States.

Like many immigrants and refugees navigating a new country, I went through an identity crisis. I was lucky, though. I had people around me—my family in particular—who gave me support. I got an education (first at Rice University and then Tulane Law School) that encouraged me to think creatively and use my lived experiences. And I turned my lifelong passion for human rights into a career in legal aid, representing marginalized communities—immigrants, migrant farmworkers and low-income people facing eviction or losing their social benefits.

I loved the work and was passionate about my clients. But I increasingly saw how the formal justice system wasn’t informed by their individual or community needs. Like me when I first arrived in the United States, my clients’ skills and knowledge weren’t valued—or applicable. They couldn’t craft solutions to their own problems. The U.S. justice system was failing people at the local level.

But it wasn’t just the U.S. justice system. When I returned to Kenya, I saw the same problems: people being forced to eschew effective community-based problem-solving to access a formal justice system that, while necessary, was in no way sufficient for long-term social and systemic change. Through legal aid, we won important victories. But without local legal empowerment to ensure compliance and continue the work, our gains were too often temporary.

Approximately two-thirds of the global population lives outside the protection of the law. Billions of people lack access to the opportunities the law provides; millions live in conditions of extreme injustice or marginalization, such as modern slavery or statelessness. This global justice gap undermines institutions that offer legal protections, perpetuates systemic inequality and prevents the realization of human rights.

Closing the global justice gap must begin with the affected individuals and communities. Legal empowerment—the belief that grassroots legal actors in marginalized and vulnerable communities are best suited to drive lasting social justice—builds on the progress legal aid groups have made by creating space for local justice advocates to pursue long-lasting change. Shifting resources to grassroots legal aid and human rights organizations creates durable opportunities for social transformation through community advocacy and mobilization.

Transforming this idea into action isn’t easy. Locally based legal empowerment movements are woefully underfunded and overlooked. Often, they’re unable to satisfy the demands of traditional funders, who require prescribed documentation like log frames or problem statements.

Even when funding is accessible, many traditional donor organizations go on to require formal elements that a local movement may not have, such as government registration and legal recognition, a constitution, finance officers and auditing systems.

Finally, most funding is short-term and project-based; it lasts for no more than a few years and is committed to specific activities. Such funding can be effective, but it works poorly in dynamic situations and fails to appreciate that lasting solutions require long-term visions and long-term support.

This funding status quo has created a cruel paradox: We all understand that marginalized communities aren’t able to access formal justice systems, but at the same time, we’ve created a funding system that is often just as inaccessible to those same communities. Inadvertently, we’ve created another glaring inequality—an access-to-resources gap that only compounds the access-to-justice gap.

Building on decades of hard-fought wins by tenacious legal aid groups and work by the global legal empowerment movement, I’m incredibly hopeful that the new Legal Empowerment Fund (LEF)—a program I’m directing at the Fund for Global Human Rights—can afford even more people the dignity and protection they need. With support from our funders and allies—including the Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Namati—our aim is to channel funding to locally rooted legal empowerment movements around the world, allowing communities to push forward more sustainable, equitable and scalable solutions to the problems they face.

We’ll let organizations use their own language and resources to tell their stories and solve their problems. And our financing mechanisms will meet communities where they are, recognizing that community-based organizations working under repressive regimes, with limited funding and limited resources, often cannot comply with complex technical and procurement processes. It’s a new approach to the funder-grantee relationship, where accountability is tethered to reality.

Legal empowerment is an idea fit for this moment. My path to this point—from law school in New Orleans to becoming a human rights advocate in Kenya—is proof that the most obvious route isn’t always the most effective. Just as my family and mentors gave me the support I needed to thrive, it’s time for us to invest in letting communities lead the fight for justice.

Atieno Odhiambo is the director of the Legal Empowerment Fund. A lawyer by training, Odhiambo’s experience ranges from working for the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Kenya to representing marginalized populations in Washington State and Kenya.

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