BarefootLaw

The Elevate Prize presents a unique and dynamic, if not rare, opportunity for innovators and innovations, dedicated to shaping the world and solving global problems. I would be proud to be a part of such a cohort, and have the chance to contribute to the positive change being advocated for.

Winning would provide exposure, visibility and legitimacy to BarefootLaw’s work which will help garner support and access to wider like-minded funding networks to enable us to overcome one of our challenges with regard to fundraising and resource mobilisation.

The prize funding would, among others, go towards improving and increasing our services:

a) in breadth by acquiring technical support and expertise to research and explore expansion and deployment of our services to new markets and 

b) in depth by perfecting our research and M&E processes to better inform the quality of our services

c) as well as upgrading of our IT and development systems

I would also greatly benefit from the support that comes with the prize on leadership development, organizational operations as well as marketing and visibility; all of which would be applied directly to the organization to build and improve our capacity to better delivery of our services.

There is an extraordinary imbalance in access to justice and the law in Uganda: the majority of lawyers are based in the capital city of Kampala, while 94% of the population live in rural areas. Moreover, awareness of legal information is low and the price for even basic legal services is high, beyond the reach of most Ugandans. I went back to law school, counter to the advice from many, and founded BarefootLaw to right this wrong. I strongly believe that access to the law for all is fundamental to a just and equitable society and new technologies play a significant role towards this. I envision a world where everyone readily has access to the law and justice, and I hope to achieve that through BarefootLaw. 

We work through innovative use of digital technology to empower people to develop legal solutions for their justice needs. Our mission is to get the law to protect vulnerable people in Africa.  We believe that if we can make the law readily available, then people will use it to prevent and resolve more legal problems peacefully, leading to less conflict. 

Our goal is to serve 50 million people across Africa by 2030.

Access to justice remains out of reach for most. Worldwide, more than 5.1 billion people face injustice and an unmet legal need — and for 1.5 billion of them, there is no remedy. Uganda was ranked 117 out of 128 rated countries as one of the countries with widespread injustice, according to the World Justice Report of 2020. More than 90% of the Ugandan population will experience a legal problem over a 4-year period. 

As a result of the lack of knowledge of their legal rights, duties and remedies, many people are often deprived of the opportunity to exercise these rights and to engage with the justice system. This has resulted in an increase of legal problems and led to people not exercising their social and economic rights and ability to undertake income generating activities.

BarefootLaw’s mission is to right this wrong, and to make sure that every citizen in society has equal access to justice under the law. We do this first by making the law easy for all Ugandan citizens to understand, and broadcasting this through multiple channels, including mobile phones, the Internet, radio and through community outreach legal education clinics. 

Our approach is innovative for:

A) developing in-house proprietary, intelligent systems such as: 

i) the BarefootLaw Integrated Operating System (B.I.O.S.), a centralized system that consolidates our various platforms and enables our lawyers to expediently respond to legal queries, while enabling us to track the effectiveness of the service we provide; 

ii) Winnie, our Artificial Intelligence Lawyer, which applies novel Artificial Intelligence algorithms as a tool designed to improve our productivity, while minimizing costs, and achieving greater impact at scale;

B) leveraging available technologies: 

i) Internet-based platforms, harness existing platforms (including email and social media) that are free to the public. This simple innovation enables remote community access to our services in Uganda and across Africa;   

ii) Short Messaging Services (SMS) and Interactive Voice, where we share simplified legal information, and through which the public can seek legal guidance from our lawyers; 

iii) Rural Radio, especially in rural communities where the radio remains a powerful channel to engage communities; 

C) Training Community mediators (BarefootLaw Nodes): we train community leaders and equip them with gadgets, installed with our AI system, Winnie, through which they can connect their communities to our legal team for legal support, connecting the unconnected and grassroots empowerment. 

To date we have provided legal information and support across nearly every aspect of the law, including succession, employment, property rights, to over 800,000 people across our platforms resulting in over 60,000 targeted legal questions, and nearly 20,000 substantive legal cases requiring skilled legal assistance to come to resolution. We believe these two levels of impact –large-scale community-level education campaigns, and legal support for individuals –go together, empowering communities to demand justice, and supporting individuals with their specific needs.

By providing legal information and support, the impact we envision is that people can use the law to resolve their legal disputes, protect their livelihoods, property, and as a result, bring stability and prosperity to their lives. A large portion of the population are unaware that they have a justice need, and how to go about resolving it. Communities cannot seek remedies to their legal problems when they do not know their rights and entitlements under the law. Through our information dissemination, we are able to create and promote legal awareness to the public; to get the law to vulnerable persons both online and offline and facilitate more stability and prosperity to the lives of vulnerable individuals and communities.