Namibia Legal Information Institute (NamibLII)

NamibLII aims to make access to law a reality by making access to legislation and court cases digital and easy to access. The majority of the Namibian Population and the African population at large has access to a smartphone. With this prize money, an App (which is already in prototype form) can be launched, bringing the law to every person's pocket. 

The Elevate support will ensure that people are aware of the service, as the traffic to the website is not optimal yet. A proper awareness campaign would ensure people have access to the most relevant laws in annotated form, even those laws from before Namibian Independence which are still in force.

Making access to justice a reality has been a passion of mine since I began studying law. I find that law is mainly based on the general manner in which society operates, but people often just want to confirm their gut feeling.

Joining the NamibLII team has given me the platform to be trained in access to the law through the internet. I am skilled at annotating laws and uploading them on a special program to make the pdf documents machine-readable and therefore more user-friendly.

I have completed to Master's degrees and I love to teach people about the law. This background allows me to research the law in detail and transmit its information to a layperson in plain terms. 

I started paying attention to how people phrase their legal questions such as: "how many people are allowed at a gathering during lockdown" or "who is the current Minister of Finance". The answer to these questions is in the Government Gazettes of any country and can be a very useful source of information if easily available to the public. The envisaged App will make that form of access a reality.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse but is seen on a daily basis, even among lawyers. The reasons for this is attributed to the confusing mass of legislation Namibia and many other colonised countries are left with. Namibia has British Admiralty Laws from 1861, Animal Protection Legislation from 1962 and our own legislation from 1990 onwards for example. These laws were not digitised before the NamibLII project and therefore mostly inaccessible. The regulations to these laws are still not digitised and are essential to the correct application of the law. I am part of a team that is busy researching the regulations relevant to Namibia before Independence and will be uploading them once ready. However, the Gazettes we are working from will have to be purchased from a private collection before publication. 

By collating, digitising and placing the laws in an easy to use App the legislation and regulations become available to Namibians and to anyone visiting Namibia or researching Namibia. The wealth of information in the legislation serves to support research, both legal and academic, and make the daily lives of citizens easier as they have access to their rights and obligations without having to consult a lawyer.

We created an index of all government notices and general notices published from Independence from 1990 to 2021. It is a body of about 7300 documents, but now they are all captured digitally and are easy to search in an App. Everything one needs to know about a country is in its Government Gazettes. That information must be made available in an easy to read and use form.

In the future, the technology will be rolled out at Legal Aid clinics and Small Claims Courts on desktops to allow users to research their own cases with some assistance from the staff at these institutions. The legislation can also be categorised in topics of interest to make legal research even easier.

A legal App does not exist in Africa. I have seen an App for a state in America. Making access to laws available through an easy to search, massive legal database using AI to assist the researcher is a new idea. 

It would be even more radical if the App was zero-rated, which is an idea that can be explored with the local service providers in the near future. 

People are daunted by law, because they do not know where to start looking for their information. The App serves as a starting point by allowing keyword searches like "covid" and providing the most relevant results. One can then click on the hyperlinks that will take the user to the NamibLII website and the relevant legislation. 

People feel hopeless when they do not have access to information. During the lockdown people grew to rely on NamibLII knowing that they can get the latest legislation and no fake news. This trust relationship has meant that our following increased from 1000 to 2000 people on Facebook in 2 months and is still growing daily. People have learnt how to use the site and no longer need to contact the administrators. We see daily traffic for diverse searches from across the world. Access to information is the greatest driver of human achievement in any field and NamibLII makes that a reality by providing accurate and timely information.