Rotary Club of Kampala Metropolitan, in conjunction with Rotaract Club of Cavendish University Uganda and Destiny Friends International (DEFI), the club’s community mobiliser and liaison conducted a legal aid clinic at Naguru Katali Primary School.
Access to justice is not a reality to people living in slums given the state’s inability to provide comprehensive legal aid to most of the people. Therefore, the project was aimed at filling this gap through the provision of legal aid and assistance to the vulnerable and marginalized Ugandans that stay in slums who cannot afford to pay lawyers in private practice. The mission is to improve access to justice and promote civic education.
This project is community-based, designed to specifically provide free legal services to the targeted beneficiaries, while at the same time resolving conflicts and obtaining remedies for grievances among slum communities in Kampala and the wider community in Uganda. The activities of the project are geared towards offering legal services, providing legal information, responsible to human right abuses, promoting law and policy reform through formal or informal institutions of justice in compliance with human right standards.
Speaking to Kampala Sqoop Rotarian Mudola Denis, the president of Rotary Club of Kampala Metropolitan cited that the idea of the camp was born after they carried out the assessment in the community.
“We realized one of the pressing issues affecting the community is the legal issues which are spam through non-related, domestic violence and children’s rights as well as the criminal elements, so we decided to hold the legal camp to educate the community on their rights, also educate the community on their duties and obligations, as fathers and mothers concerning children.”
“We anticipate that the community will benefit, being educated on legal matters and the law, most importantly get free legal services which is not going to just entail the consultative meeting kind of advisory. We also intend take up those also who have pressing issues probably which will require court or following up in the different government departments and refer them to different layers in the clubs composed of nine layers, so we intend to assign the different people in the different pressing issues to different layers to help them.”
Mudola added, “we intend to hold the quarterly legal camps in the community, but it doesn’t end here today. We plan to have these legal clinics on quarterly basis and for those who have issues we’ll continuously help them throughout until when their problems are resolved. As you know, the beginning is always hard but we are hopeful that the results will be tremendous.”
While making her comments, Vicky Aryenyo, the ED DEFI said that, “today’s event is a rare one in which we are partnering with the Rotary Club of Kampala Metropolitan where we decided to bring down this legal clinic to the people of Naguru. Before this, we have been doing a number of activities still in conjunction with the Rotary Club of Kampala Metropolitan such as family health days, providing free HIV testing and counselling, free medical support and tuitional support among others.”
Just like Mudola, Aryenyo said after carrying out a needs assessment meeting in Naguru ii, the issue of malaria in the community came up and after that was addressed another thing was high crimes rates in the community.
“We realized that there were rampart crimes in the community. So based on the needs assessment, we teamed up with the Rotary Club of Kampala to help Naguru II parish, particularly this area given its bad record as a place with high crime rates, with free legal clinics aimed at cleaning up the area.
We want to change the belief that the law is for the poor, the wealthy and the rich do not break the law and also the slum syndrome of, ‘’I can’t do it, I can’t even take this matter to court.”
She added that most slum dwellers think they can’t afford court and they be like let’s settle it here, I don’t have the ability, we hear about this court things dragging and so on, I do not have the money to handle court issues.”
So on that background, we have come down to support the vulnerable community with free support. Its always said that ignorance of the law and we believe awareness is what these people have been lacking for them to know their rights among other vital issues.
