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Tigwepo - March, 2017 4
Add the burning issue of Gender Based Violence (GBV) and you have a litany of CSO interventions intently focused on one issue with more or less the same approach for addressing it. In fairness, there has been success at different levels: for instance, the increased number of referrals done by paralegals trained by Women for Change in Lundazi; the enhanced awareness over the anti-GBV Act as a result of WiLDAF’s work in Katete; and enhanced community participation in land disputes resolution in Mansa and Chembe as a result of VSO’s work, all of which came through the European Union (EU)-supported access to justice work, shows that success can be attained even with this narrow focus. But there remains room not only to build on this success, but even to deepen it.
Enter widening the scope for access to justice. Far from dismissing the previous focus on paralegals and GBV as not being important any more, the widened scope of access to justice seeks to create a more comprehensive understanding of access to justice issues, and thereby encourage CSOs and other stakeholders to design projects and programmes that respond to this widened scope. To actualize this, ZGF with support from the EU recently launched a Call for Proposals to enable CSOs access funding to implement wide-scoped access to justice projects touching on 4 key issues: child labour; land rights; youths; and environmental justice. The idea is for CSOs to innovatively think through these four broad issues, identify dimensions of access to justice in relation to these issues, and design projects that seek to address those dimensions using an approach that promotes interaction with decision makers at different levels (policy engagement). The element of interacting with decision makers is especially important as ZGF believes that such interactions at different levels of society play a pivotal role in bringing about change that will benefit the poor and vulnerable in society.
Indeed as the UN’s broadened definition shows, access to justice should be seen more as a means to prevent and overcome human poverty (UN, 2003). Actualising this requires that CSOs and all other stakeholders “think outside the box” to adopt a broader view of what access to justice entails, beyond what has been the norm. It requires them to identify wider dimensions of injustice in the specific issues they have been working on, and use this widened approach to design and implement innovative interventions that will bring about change. In effect, this widened scope of access to justice presents an opportunity to contribute to change through more comprehensive and innovative approaches. So the opportunity is here. Seize it. Visit the Access to Justice page on our website to learn more about the project.