Womens Justice Initiative Inc

WJI works to prevent violence against women and girls (VAWG) and child marriage and improve access to justice for indigenous women in rural communities. WJI addresses the current gaps and barriers to justice that exist for rural Maya women and girls by providing them with geographically, culturally, and financially accessible education programs and legal services, 100% of which are offered in Kaqchikel, the local Mayan language. WJI’s programs implement a human-rights-based approach to advance gender equality and prevent and address violence against women and girls. WJI's approach empowers women to know and claim their rights and responds directly to the needs women identify in their communities.

WJI works at both the community and municipal levels to prevent VAWG and to ensure that Maya women and girls in rural communities in Guatemala have improved access to justice. WJI works to fill the gaps among existing social and legal services in rural areas, implementing community-based solutions to bolster national efforts to address gender-based violence. WJI’s rights-based methodology transforms norms and attitudes that view VAWG as acceptable. WJI’s success demonstrates that community-based responses, embedded within a strong existing legal framework, are feasible and necessary components of ending VAWG across Guatemala.

WJI operates four programs, employing an ecological approach that combines the implementation of comprehensive legal empowerment initiatives with mobile legal outreach and justice system capacity building:

1) Women’s Rights Education: provides indigenous women in rural areas with both knowledge of their rights and the skills necessary to protect those rights.
2) Legal Services: provides mobile legal outreach in Kaqchikel, the native Mayan language, in rural communities, sometimes incorporating video-conferencing technology to improve access to the hardest-to-reach communities and women with disabilities.
3) Community Advocates: trains local women to become leaders in their communities, accompany survivors of violence, conduct workshops on VAWG prevention, and mentor women and girls. Advocates are a key component of ensuring the sustainability of WJI’s work, as they continue to serve as a resource for women in their communities beyond WJI’s project implementation.
4) Adolescent Girls: educates adolescent girls on their rights, self-esteem, and the importance of delaying marriage.

WJI has found that its combined training and service delivery model is successful in empowering women to identify their legal needs and initiate legal processes both in cases of VAWG and in securing economic rights. By building the capacity of local institutions and collaborating with justice system actors, WJI also works to strengthen democratic functioning and improve the institutional response to cases of VAWG and child marriage in rural communities.

WJI was founded in 2011 to tackle gender inequality and VAWG in indigenous communities in Guatemala. WJI piloted its first program, the Women’s Rights Education Program, in one community with 15 participants. In 2012, it expanded the program into 5 additional communities. Between 2012 and 2015, WJI developed three complementary programs: the Legal Services Program, the Community Advocates Program, and the Adolescent Girls Program.

WJI has been steadily expanding since its first United Nations Democracy Fund grant was awarded in 2018. A multi-year grant from the Tinker Foundation followed in 2020. In 2021, WJI was awarded its second highly competitive three-year grant from the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women, which facilitated its geographic expansion into two new municipalities. WJI now works in 73 communities in the municipalities of Patzún, Tecpán, San Juan Comalapa, San Martín Jilotepeque, and San José Poaquil. With increased financial support, WJI has been able to continue hiring more staff and expanding its program reach.

WJI now has a women-led team of 28 full-time staff members, nearly all of whom are Maya-Kaqchikel and from the communities WJI serves, with a profound understanding of the local cultural context. WJI has a horizontal structure in which all staff are involved in strategic decision-making processes and programmatic decisions are informed by the needs of participants. WJI is governed by a majority-female, ten-person Board of Directors that represents both Guatemala and the United States. WJI is consistently recognized as a local leader in responding to and preventing VAWG, proving that community-based approaches are a vital component in creating long-term change.

WJI’s legal empowerment work is achieving key results in rural areas of Guatemala. WJI:

1) Increases access to justice for Maya women and girls through legal aid programs, which empower them to assert and protect their rights, seek legal assistance for violence, and secure their economic rights.
2) Transforms existing social norms that view violence against women and girls (VAWG) as normal and acceptable.
3) Improves support for survivors of violence from local and municipal authorities.

WJI has directly served over 46,000 individuals since 2011, benefitting over 70,000 women, men and children. In 2021, 4,089 individuals in 56 rural communities participated in WJI’s programs.

Since its founding, WJI:

-Provided legal aid to over 2,000 women and their families.
-Trained more than 2,900 women and girls through its legal empowerment programs.
-Provided capacity-building workshops on VAWG to over 600 community leaders, police, and government officials.
-Enacted 32 Community Action Plans to prevent and combat child marriage and VAWG.
-Trained 82 women to become Community Advocates, or grassroots legal advocates, who provide long-term support for women and girls in their communities.

In the areas where WJI works, women’s attitudes about violence are changing: only 6% of WJI participants agreed that it is justified for a husband to abuse his wife, a 71% decrease from WJI’s baseline data. Community norms are changing as well. WJI experienced a 145% increase in case referrals from 2016 to 2017, a direct result of the trainings WJI conducts with local police and judicial and health officials.

WJI’s activities have a lasting impact in the communities it serves. After completing WJI’s programs, 42% of participants sought legal aid from WJI, whereas 4% of women reported having previously received legal aid. In a 2019 external evaluation, 100% of women affirmed that they felt stronger and safer after going through WJI’s programs and 98% of women reported that WJI has improved their lives. Furthermore, 95% of women said that WJI’s programs have supported them in preventing violence in their lives.

WJI plans to continue refining its model and scaling its work to more Kaqchikel-speaking communities throughout the Guatemalan highlands, where VAWG is endemic and gender equality remains pervasive. WJI will continue to partner with government entities, such as the Municipal Women's Offices (DMM), in order to better ensure sustainability. WJI also envisions sponsoring a scholarship for young Maya women to study law and then return to their municipalities to provide legal services through the DMM.