Making the Law Accessible to Everyone in Mozambique

Equip Mozambique is a Mozilla IRL Fund Awardee. We spoke with Project Lead Jonathan Reinagel about how the organization combines technology and in-person community events to help vulnerable communities assert their legal rights

• High levels of gender inequality and discrimination persist across Mozambique, especially when it comes to land ownership, inheritance, and other legal rights.

• Common experiences of injustice include underpayments, late payments, or non-payments to employees, and land and house thefts by foreign governments or corporations.

• Equip Mozambique’s Juris Law and Rights Campaign uses both technology and face-to-face meetings and community events to help people understand and assert their legal rights.

The Issue

Mozambicans, especially those in rural areas, can experience injustice regarding employment law, land ownership, inheritance, and more. For example, workers whose employers are late with payments sometimes go weeks or months without wages, racking up enormous debts from loans they take to meet living expenses. Meanwhile, some Mozambicans have also been unlawfully forced off of lands they own by big developers and corporations. Widows have become destitute when their deceased husbands’ extended families seize their land and assets, which is against the law but standard practice.

The Approach

Equip Mozambique’s Juris Law and Rights Campaign’s goal is twofold – to teach people about their legal rights, and to help them effectively exercise them. The organization developed the Juris app to provide accurate information about the areas of Mozambican law that are most relevant to vulnerable populations including workers, women, and landowners. The app uses text and images designed to be accessible to wide audiences, but it’s only one part of the solution. “We found that many people don’t have cell phones, and digital-only isn’t a great solution for Mozambique,” Reinagel said. The app is a piece of what Reinagel calls a larger “law and justice ecosystem.” It includes performance dramas demonstrating how to advocate for oneself in common scenarios of rights violations; social media and radio outreach campaigns; and other gatherings to spread awareness and understanding.

Equip Mozambique is one the first 13 awardees of Mozilla’s “In Real Life” (IRL) Fund, which supports community-serving organizations in Africa that are advancing digital and human rights, both on-and offline — with a particular focus on Eastern and Southern Africa. This grantmaking mechanism is part of the Africa Innovation Mradi, a program that leverages Mozilla’s role as stewards of the open web to promote innovation grounded in the unique needs of users in African countries. The organization is using the funding to add an important reporting function to the Juris app. Equip Mozambique has also benefited on the tech side from connecting with – and learning from – other Mozilla awardees and partners through events like MozFest.

Juris Law recently began bringing in lawyers to speak to women at a local sewing school about their legal rights, many of whom are widows and single mothers. “Their response was a righteous anger – many of them said they wouldn’t be in their desperate situation if they had just known what their rights were,” Reinagel said. Hearing the women’s stories first-hand continues to motivate the team to do everything it can to equip them with the information they need to advocate for themselves.

What Does Success Look Like?

One major benefit of the Juris app is that people can use it to determine whether or not they even need a lawyer or whether they would be better served going straight to a governmental agency. If people use the app as a first port of call, it can make them more informed clients when they eventually first meet with a lawyer, freeing up lawyers to work on the most urgent cases. "We will know our work is done when our app becomes the first step for learning about the law and rights before interacting with a lawyer, and when this project is being supported by a team of local developers," Reinagel said.

Inspiration/Hero

“Martin Luther King, Jr. has always been a hero to me. He taught his congregation everything from economics, to how to shop, to how to organize. He was also instrumental in bringing various groups together for systemic change. And he fought against the injustices he saw everywhere in society, not just the ones he was facing.

William Wilberforce’s life has also had a strong impact on me. He fought against slavery for 30 years in parliament before it was finally overturned, and the way he finally ended up getting it overturned was to first remove the economic incentive for it. Only after that was he able to get laws passed against it.”