NAMATI

We advance social and environmental justice by building a movement of people who know, use, and shape the law.

Namati and our partners train and deploy community paralegals—also known as barefoot lawyers—to support communities in taking on some of the greatest injustices of our times: protecting community lands, enforcing environmental law, and securing basic rights to healthcare and citizenship. Together with the communities we serve, we strive to translate the lessons from our grassroots experience into positive, large-scale changes to laws and systems.

Namati also convenes the Legal Empowerment Network, over 2,700 organizations and 10,360 individuals from every part of the world. We are learning from one another, advocating together, and joining forces to bring justice everywhere.

1. Paralegals work with communities to solve justice problems at the grassroots. Together, they protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship. These remedies improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year.

2. The individuals who work closely with the paralegals learn about their rights and how to realize them using the law. They often go on to support others in their communities, creating ripples of empowerment.

3. We draw on grassroots experience to advocate for changes that make the system better for everyone. Paralegals rigorously collect data on every case they handle. We assess that information to identify where systems are failing and how they can improve. Together with the communities with which we work, we use that information to advocate for reforms to laws and policies. These changes can positively affect entire nations.

Namati is the first and only global organization dedicated to legal empowerment. Since our founding in 2011 we have demonstrated how paralegals can advance justice in four areas – citizenship, health, land, and environment – and we have convened a 7500+ member global network dedicated to legal empowerment.

We operate in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Kenya, India, Myanmar and the United States, where we are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. We undergird a mission-driven culture with integrated systems – finance, human resources, communications, and others – that support our functioning as an integrated whole, while respecting the context and independence of our offices. We currently administer nearly 40+ awards from a broad range of funders, and have received clean financial audits every year since inception.

We employ nearly 160 staff across our offices, including over 50 paralegals directly employed by Namati. We often jointly implement with partner organizations –such as the Nubian Rights Forum in Kenya or Than Lwin Thisar in Myanmar – who bring local knowledge and legitimacy. Our joint implementing partners employ another nearly 150 paralegals.

We are a learning organization. We study all our efforts rigorously. We collect data on every case and have developed common indicators that allow us to learn comparatively across issues and countries. We seek to continuously improve our work and to grow the evidence base for our field.

Namati’s work has been featured in/on Democracy Journal, Amanpour & Co. New York Times, the Guardian, WIRED, the Washington Post, among others, and has been documented by the Sundance Institute. Vivek Maru, Namati’s CEO, gave a TED Talk in 2017 which has been viewed over a million times. In 2016, Namati was honored with the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and in 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek Maru and colleague Sonkita Conteh two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. Namati has a perfect score, 100/100, on Charity Navigator and has earned Guidestar’s Gold Seal of Transparency. Since Namati’s inception they have received clean audits without qualification.

Please download our annual reports. The most recent one is here: https://namati.org/impact-report-2020/