Hope Behind Bars Africa Initiative

I would use Elevate Prize funding and support to strengthen my organization's programs and growth towards improving our capacity to make sustainable impact and to amplify our work so that more people can access our services and our movement of lawyers can grow stronger.

We have supported some of our beneficiaries to rebuild their lives and we want to tell the world that incarceration is not the end of the world. We want to tell stories of some of our beneficiaries whose lives were almost destroyed by our to criminal justice system as a form of advocacy and to create more awareness on the need for action.

In more specific terms, we will be able to fully launch Made in Corrections, a social enterprise that empowers and supports women and young men behind bars with alternative skills and revenue generating opportunities which in turn helps to make our work sustainable. We will update our web-based app and market it so more people can use it. We will be able to pay a moderate salary to our core team and we will be able to build the capacity of our media, advocacy and communications team towards amplifying our work.

In 1999, my dad spent 12 days and 12 nights in a dark putrid cell for a crime he did not commit. He was tortured and denied of his fundamental right to fair hearing and access to justice. Mum had to sell all we had to pay a lawyer. I learnt first hand that Nigeria's criminal justice system was largely corrupt and unfair to the poor. This incident fueled my desire to become a human rights defender.

In 2012, as a final year law student, I researched and wrote my  thesis on justice reforms, I saw how worse the system had become. By 2013, I began to volunteer at the law school clinic. Between 2015 and 2017,I successfully co-defended 14 indigent inmates on a false capital charge. In March 2018, I had a near death experience  that resulted in the death of my child. This led me to drop everything to focus on purpose. Hope Behind Bars Africa was born in May 2018 with the mission of being a beacon of hope to the incarcerated and a voice for criminal justice reforms. My goal is to build an organization that will make generational impact on criminal justice reforms in Africa.

Hope Behind Bars Africa exists primarily to uphold human rights in the criminal justice system and to restore dignity to the incarcerated through advocacy, building the capacity of stakeholders in the system, provision of free legal services to indigent inmates and creating opportunities for our beneficiaries to rebuild their lives.

World Prison Brief Reports that out of every 10 incarcerated person in Nigeria, 7.2 are awaiting trial inmates. The excessive use of pre-trial detention and the criminalization of petty offences  has exacerbated prison congestion which according to Penal Reform International is arguably the biggest single problem facing prison systems. Recent data showed that Nigeria has overtaken India as the poverty capital of the world. Nigeria's prison is congested with people who commit petty offences  because of poverty. Their status makes it near impossible to access the services of a lawyer and the state's legal aid system is largely inadequate. Rehabilitation, correction and empowerment of inmates is almost non-existent. 

Using enabling laws we advocate and work with all stakeholders to build  programs that addresses the root cause of the problem. We also work directly with the affected population to ensure their human rights and core needs are protected and met.

We leverage technology through our web-based app "connect lawyer" to connect criminal defense lawyers to indigent inmates who require their services across Nigeria and we have an in house monitoring system through which we are able to monitor the progress of all cases.

Secondly, our approach to rehabilitation is empowering and we are the only organization in Nigeria that has built a model for inmates to be  trained and empowered with vocational skills, earn good money while in prison while building soft skills. In 2020, the German Embassy in Nigeria contracted female inmates through our social enterprise - Made in Corrections to make 1470 reusable facemasks that was distributed to the prison community and low income individuals. Through this, some of the women were able to support their families from income earned in prison. Other components of this work which we are testing is the immersive learning course, an online rehabilitation and empowerment course for women and girls behind bars.

Our Back on Track project is equally innovative. We work with an inmates at the point of entry into the criminal justice system and we support them till they leave and are able rebuild their life.

We are making an impact through the following programs:

Our Access to Justice program involves leveraging on the defense skills of lawyers in our database to provide free legal services to indigent pre-trial inmates.  Over 105 inmates have benefited from this program. 

Our empowerment, rehabilitation and reentry programs majorly targets women and young men. We equip their heads, hands and hearts using an immersive learning system so they can change their stories.

We engage in issue based advocacy and we build the capacity of stakeholders in the criminal justice system leveraging on our partnership with Cornell University Center for Death Penalty Worldwide and the National Human Rights Commission. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, we joined other voices to advocate for the prison doors to be shut to prevent COVID-19 from entering the prison and the government heard us. 

The programs and activities above are effective because we have programs that deals with the root causes of the problems and programs that elevates the lives of the population we serve. Also, the testimony of our beneficiaries and the calls from the prison service for us to do more is reason why we believe we are doing effective work.