The World Justice Project

WJP SUPPORTS GRASSROOTS INITIATIVES FOR RULE OF LAW

The World Justice Project is funding 12 projects to strengthen the rule of law led by professionals from a variety of disciplines in sub-Sarahan Africa. These initiatives are taking place in 11 sub-Saharan African countries, and were selected from proposals submitted by participants in the WJP’s January 2008 multidisciplinary outreach meeting held in Accra, Ghana.

The issues the projects address, and the range of disciplines they engage, illustrate how widely the rule of law touches people’s well-being, safety, and opportunities. For example, three projects focus on women, rights and the law:

• The 50/50 Group of Sierra Leone is supporting the implementation of legislation that protects women’s rights relating to domestic violence, inheritance, marriage and divorce by developing simplified language and materials describing the content of the legislation, and using these materials to educate traditional rulers, local governments, law enforcement officials, education specialists, religious leaders and members of the community about the new laws.
• The Ethiopian Public Health Association is bringing together judicial and law enforcement officials, traditional rulers and religious leaders to address harmful traditional practices of female cutting, early marriage and related issues affecting women.
• In Nigeria, the Women’s Aid Collective is holding a workshop with women chiefs and traditional rulers to sensitize them to rule of law principles, especially as these relate to protecting the rights of women and girls.

Projects in three other countries address labor, employment and safety issues.

• A workshop entitled “The rule of law and the mechanism of dismissal” is educating investors, employers and workers in Madagascar on the laws concerning the termination of an employment contract, an issue that is often tainted by corruption.
• Labor officers, social workers, union representatives, business and human resource representatives, chemists and industrial inspectors, doctors and the media will be involved in a workshop in Tanzania focusing on new laws protecting women temporary workers in clothing factories and flower farms.
• In Malawi, a trade union is hosting outreach meetings at which legal experts will educate union members on workers’ rights, democratic principles and good governance.

Some projects focus on the intersection between formal codes of law and informal systems. For example, a Nigerian project seeks to better integrate formal and informal policing systems and to standardize the conduct and improve the human rights records of the informal structures. Participants will include representatives of informal policing structures, the Nigerian police force, legal practitioners, the national human rights commission, traditional rulers, representatives of women’s groups, and the media.

The multidisciplinary breadth of these efforts is also visible in the discussions focusing on corruption in the construction industry in Zimbabwe. These meetings involve engineers, architects, bankers, legal professionals, medical personnel, professors, government officials, and international and local project funders to address corruption facing the construction industry and other projects in Zimbabwe.

The leaders of four of these projects will discuss the outcomes of their initiatives at the World Justice Forum in July and will provide their recommendations for continued multidisciplinary collaboration to strengthen the rule of law.

The WJP anticipates announcing a new “Opportunity Fund” at the World Justice Forum, which will fund new locally driven collaborative initiatives to strengthen the rule of law at the local, national and international levels.