Abstract
Community lawyering and collaborative lawyering are two of the most widely used human rights advocacy tactics by North American law school clinics. However, existing literature shows that neither of these two tactics alone can effectively materialize the empowerment of the concerned underprivileged and marginalized communities. While community lawyering does focus on building leadership in close connection with the community, without collaborative lawyering the leadership can become stagnant in time. Similarly, while collaborative lawyering equitably shares the decision-making powers with the community, it does not specifically focus on building sustainable leadership within the community. Hence, by way of analyzing an ongoing clinical project of International Human Rights Clinical Project at Harvard Law School, I argue that a balanced amalgamation of both the advocacy strategies can produce the best result—effective community leaders with experienced partners to fight for their rights and provide for a more effective clinical pedagogical method for students. Due to the diverse nature of human rights advocacy tactics, this article focuses only on economic, social and cultural rights advocacy.
Introduction
Promotion and protection of human rights is a multidimensional process. Over the years, this process has experienced various concrete strategies including litigation, judicial activism and human rights advocacy. The filter of ‘human rights’ distinctly transforms the dimensions and notions of advocacy per se: the forms and strategies of human rights advocacy change with the nature of challenges, stakeholders and activists. Two advocacy strategies which offer a wide opportunity for the stakeholders to get directly engaged with the cause are community lawyering and collaborative lawyering. These two advocacy strategies are often used interchangeably, but in this article, I argue that there are slight yet significant differences between the two approaches: the demarcation between the two strategies in effect determines the ownership and empowerment of the rights holders themselves vis-à-vis the lawyers. It is due to such tensions and gaps between the advocates and communities that the deliverables are not being achieved as expected.
I use the example of a clinical project at Harvard Law School (HLS) on ‘Access to Right to Education in South Africa’. This clinical project collaborates with the International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) at Harvard and Equal Education Law Clinic (EELC) from South Africa together. The project illustrates how the tensions between community and collaborative lawyering can be dissolved by empowerment of the stakeholders, and how the transnational nature of such collaborative clinical projects deprives the clinical law students from learning community empowerment tactics.
Before moving on to analysis, I shall introduce the clinical project in detail and discuss the intricacies of human rights advocacy in the context of economic, social and cultural rights (ESCR).
Students Stepping into the Real World: Learning Human Rights Advocacy in North American Law Clinics
Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School define law clinics or clinical legal education as studying law and practising it with real clients with real problems under supervising attorneys, which gives law students hands-on experience. Clinics offer students the opportunity to develop policy while receiving academic credits in diversified settings. 2 The IHRC at HLS practices human rights advocacy on a professional level. Through the clinic, students collaborate on real-life cases and legal campaigns to link theory with practice. Clinical law teaches students skills necessary for overcoming the bars and challenges embedded in ESCR advocacy.
The International Human Rights Clinical Project on Access to Education
As a graduate student, I observed very closely how community and collaborative lawyering can affect the momentum of ESCR advocacy while working with the IHRC at HLS. 3 The project I was working on was ‘Right to Education and Scholar Transport in South Africa’. It is a human rights advocacy project for establishing a mechanism for a proper scholar transport system to assist the young South African scholars (students from the primary to the matriculation classes) to access 4 their Right to Education in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa.
The project was primarily undertaken by a South African pro bono organization EELC 5 which subsequently collaborated with the IHRC. The third actor in the project is Equal Education (EE), 6 a movement of learners, parents, teachers and community members working for quality and equality in South African education.
Right to Education and Scholar Transport in South Africa
South Africa is one of the few countries where ESCR are recognized by the Constitution as justiciable fundamental rights. 7 Nonetheless, the rights are not easy to realize due to the harsh poverty prevalent in the country. Unavailability of a proper school transport system affects the availability (the nearest school is generally 60–120 minute walk from home), accessibility (dangerous terrain, creeks and rivers during rainy season, presence of kidnappers and rapists 8 on the road) 9 and acceptability (using bicycles instead of walking to school carries a social stigma, especially for girls) 10 of the education provided, 11 and thus violates the learners’ constitutional right to receive a proper education. The problem of not having a public school transport facility has been recognized by government officials. The countrywide situation is considered to be very complex due to all the different role players, the different modes of transport and the differing circumstances throughout the country. 12
The South African government has long been engaged in developing a national policy for scholar transport (state provided transportations for commuting students to and back from school). At the outset, the responsibility had been deputed to the provincial governments to come up with policies suitable for their respective areas. While deputation to the provincial governments ensured limited realization of scholar transport, it also resulted in the sharp discrepancies and inequalities. The national government has from time to time taken initiatives on scholar transport with little coherence and little success. One such example is the Shova Kalula (pedal easy) bicycle project. In 2001, the Department of Transport (DOT) introduced it as a low cost solution to improve people’s mobility in rural and urban areas and specially targeted students. Till 2014, the project made little progress, and the Transport Minister Dipuo Peters acknowledged in August that DOT is now exploring further options with public–private collaboration. 13 Meanwhile, the Ministry of Basic Education (MoBE) has been drafting, redrafting, redesigning a national scholar transport policy and producing numerous green papers and white papers, but till date the MoBE has not finalized the ‘Draft National Scholar Transport Policy 2009’. 14
In South Africa, transport facilities and infrastructural development vary from region to region. The differing financial conditions from family to family add to the varying level of access to transport facilities. The well-to-do families usually have private vehicles which makes scholar transport a less important issue for them to consider, but the poor students seriously require school-provided or state-provided transport. Rural areas are more difficult. 15 Ten million of South Africa’s 13 million learners walk to school, with 3 million (from rural areas) walking more than 6 km, 16 taking 1.5 to 2.5 hours getting to and from school. 17 KZN scored highest with scholars walking for longer than 30 minutes 18 (followed by the Eastern Cape, Mpumalanga and North West Province). 19
These long walks have implications for learners’ access to and quality of education. Children, especially in urban areas, often have no footpaths and are forced to walk on the streets. Such commutes pose dangers like being mugged, raped 20 and bullied and risk of being hit by cars 21 and limit their ability to benefit from school (too tired to do homework). 22
In this context, the IHRC project first analyzed the intricacies of ESCR mechanism in the larger paradigm of human rights advocacy.
ESCR and Advocacy Strategies
Human rights advocacy tactics most often opt for either of two directions: top-down or bottom-up. One of the very first lessons the students of human rights advocacy learn is that human rights advocacy is a long, slow and tenuous process. This gradual nature is in a sense the core characteristic of human rights advocacy because the goal of the advocacy is achieving change in the status quo which is time consuming. This is also known as the ‘Theory of Change’: that changing the denial of people’s rights by creating a rights-based culture as an end result, where human rights are protected as a durable situation and in perpetuity, rather than being a temporary change. ‘Theory of Change’ is a tool for developing solutions to complex social problems. 23 It is necessary because it shows a detailed description and strategic depiction of what, how and why a change is desired in a given socio-legal-economic or political context. Unless such detailed illustration is sketched out in the beginning, community initiatives will result in plans without explicit understanding of the challenges and intermediate steps required for long-term changes anticipated. 24 Theory of Change focuses on the existing gaps in the system and how they can be ‘filled up’ by determining programme initiatives such as human rights interventions through campaigns. In ‘Theory of Change’, one must first identify what status must be changed, that is, the goals and how the goals can be achieved, that is, the plan of action/strategy. 25 The Theory of Change successfully challenges the Savage–Victim–Savior 26 (SVS) myth, which has for long haunted human rights lawyering.
Realizing that this Theory of Change is harder when it concerns ESCR, these rights are seldom treated at par with civil and political rights and not often recognized as ‘equal’ human rights. The reason behind this dualism is well known: while the benchmarks of civil and political rights are more visible, those of ESCR are more abstract and complicated, hence the reason the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 speaks of ‘progressive realisation’ of the ESCR, unlike the civil and political rights. As such, advocacy for ESCR is a more complex and difficult strategy. In the next section, I will take community lawyering and collaborative lawyering as two strategies of ESCR advocacy and analyze how they affect the Theory of Change. These differences, I submit, deeply influence the ‘Theory of Change’.
Theory of Change: Strategy v. Goal
Charles Elsesser, 27 Director of Community Justice Project of Florida Legal Services and a renowned community lawyer, criticizes the ‘under-representative’ nature of human rights advocacy strategies. 28 Elsesser observes that the poor and the underprivileged people are constantly ‘divorced’ of the leadership in fighting for their own rights. 29 It is the lawyers in the long run who receive attention and remain in the focus. The leading human rights cases litigated by the rights NGOs (Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust [BLAST] 30 , Ain O Salish Kendra [ASK] 31 , etc.) in Bangladesh accentuate this assumption. For example, in the Slum Eviction Case, 32 BLAST along with residents of Jhilpara Slum in Dhaka challenged an eviction notice issued by the Executive Magistrate to evict nearly 2,000 inhabitants of the slum on grounds of illegal occupation. Following the petitioner’s arguments that forced eviction without prior rehabilitation constitutes a violation of the right to life guaranteed by Article 32 of the Bangladesh Constitution and also the state obligations under the ICESCR (International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) 1966, the court stayed the operation. The case was won, and the slum dwellers were saved from eviction; but the slum dwellers continued living ‘in the slums, not in a better facility’. Similarly, in the Ain O Salish Kendra (ASK) v. Bangladesh and others, 33 ASK filed a petition pursuant to newspaper reports on child labour in bidi (local cigarettes) factories, Rangpur, seeking a court order to declare that the unhealthy and unhygienic conditions in the factories were illegal and unconstitutional. The court suggested those children compelled to work be provided a free meal and all necessary expenses for attending school, but child labour is still in practice. 34 Again, in Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA) v. Cabinet Division, Bangladesh Secretariat, and Others, 35 the court observed that a maltreated domestic worker’s long hours of work with dangerous materials and fire was tantamount to hazardous work, and government was directed to ensure mandatory registration of all domestic workers through the respective local government units. However, domestic labour is still unregistered and children aides still face torture. 36
So, the big question remains: To what extent the fate of the poor has changed when the movers and shakers are ‘others’?
As such, there is a gap between the lawyering approach and the people for which the approach is taken. Elsesser terms this gap as a ‘detachment of constituency’ and suggests that meaningful systemic change cannot result from this depoliticized and atomized approach. This also strengthens the powerlessness of the constituency by feeding into the SVS myth of western human rights paradigm. The late yet crucial realization of the necessity of involving the constituency in the movement developed a new advocacy strategy that puts the constituency in the centre to achieve meaningful change by their own leadership. 37
It is precisely for this tension and the positive changes that the IHRC project becomes a model of empowerment lawyering. Recognizing that, EELC is taking steps to ensure community ownership.
Community Lawyering and Collaborative Lawyering: A Connotative Approach 38
Community lawyering is a model of advocacy that involves formal or informal collaborations with communities and community groups to identify and address community issues. 39 It encourages lawyers to critically and creatively examine non-traditional forms of advocacy such as organizing and other grassroots actions as a way of addressing the legal and non-legal problems of their clients. 40 It refers to the progressive social justice form of advocacy that encourages lawyers to collaborate actively with their clients in evaluating solutions to legal and non-legal problems that their clients face. 41 Community lawyering is focused on promoting economic and social justice and fostering systemic change. Implicitly, then, if not explicitly, community lawyers 42 are invested in long-term community commitments to advance these goals. Collaborative lawyering, on the other hand, builds and unites like-minded actors on a common platform to empower the communities and identify community leaders.
Both the strategies eschew the traditional model of representation in varying degrees in order to promote client autonomy, emphasize and use the power of ‘non-litigious’ strategies to accomplish goals and hold the goals in terms of systemic power and economic texture, rather than litigation. 43
In my four months long engagement in the advocacy campaign, I noticed that community and collaborative lawyering done by EELC and IHRC to a noticeable extent had failed to remove the distance between the stakeholders (i.e., the advocates) and the targets group (i.e., the constituencies). The IHRC as a collaborating partner set the multidimensional strategic actions which were driven to remove this gap, but the distance of the IHRC students from the community itself resulted in a much nuanced impact. This poses a question that whether the project succeeded in balancing the community and collaborative lawyering in an effective manner.
The Project: Was it Collaborative or Community Lawyering?
As an advocacy strategy, the clinical project can be dissected into three parts: community lawyering, transnational lawyering and collaborative lawyering. These three components of the project ran simultaneously yet involve three separate actors: the IHRC, EE and the EELC. The IHRC is the transnational lawyer, EE is the community lawyer and EELC is the collaborative lawyer. The strength of the advocacy comes once the actions of the three actors are combined.
The Collaborative Part
In the IHRC project, collaborative approach is twofold and very clear: the IHRC collaborated with EELC on a transnational basis, while EELC collaborated with the community itself. Before EELC started the campaign on scholar transport issue earlier in 2014, there were other groups since long, demanding for a coherent scholar transport provision in South Africa and also KZN more specifically. These pre-existing groups consisted of parents, 44 political parties, 45 teachers unions, the South African Human Rights Commission 46 and even the government departments themselves. 47
Therefore, the EELC as a professional collaborator drives it towards the goal in a more composed, planned and compact manner. So far as the legal argument is concerned, it is primarily being crafted by the EELC, but it needs to be informed by the community. 48 This vital requirement is fulfilled by EELC’s relation with EE.
In plain sight, the collaborative components seem to run perfectly and one can actually timeline the achievements and fruits of the activities taken from time to time. For example, in the early stages of the project (Fall 2014), the clinic designed campaign strategies for the EELC and EE which were carried out in KZN from the Spring 2015. By the Fall 2015, the clinic received a success story that the head of the KZN Department of Education (under the MoBE) to provide buses to three schools in Nquthu (in KZN Province), the students of which had provided testimonies against the government officials. 49
However, a critical perspective will discover noticeable shortcomings, such as the key decision-making power and executing authority lie mainly with EELC and EE, while the main members of EELC become the spokesperson to deal with the media and the Government to discuss the movement and forward the claims.
These shortcomings may be attributable to the nature of human rights advocacy, rather than to the project itself. EELC as a pro bono organization has been community lawyering in many of their projects. Before the Right to Education project, EELC received a nationwide attention by their ‘Norms and Standards Movement for School Infrastructure’. 50 The Norms and Standards Movement illustrated a campaign driven by the students and parents demanding from the Parliament and MoBE a uniform infrastructural standard for all school buildings throughout KZN. In that project, EELC principally played a ‘behind the curtains role’, while the stakeholders themselves directed rallies, conducted sit-on protests in front of Parliament during sessions, etc.
The Community Part
Similarly, in the IHRC project, EELC is engaged in community lawyering by conducting meetings and discussions with the community about how absence of school transport, commonly known in South Africa as scholar transport, affects them, by collecting student testimonies to present before the ministry and by organizing awareness-raising programmes. The community lawyering involves client-centred lawyering 51 as one of the tactics: EELC learns and comprehends the dimensions of the problem from the community’s perspectives, engages with the community to work together and creates community leaders for the movement by training the ‘Equalizers’. Equalizer is the title for the community volunteers of EE (not EELC) who are themselves students and represent the community as spokespersons. EELC and EE are doing a large amount of field work through collaborating with the equalizers.
However, in this collaboration and leadership creation process, the community is not always in a position to affect the decision-making. Collaborative lawyering is just one of the tactics 52 used for community empowerment which is a key aspect of the project. In the theory of community lawyering, amongst his/her many roles, a community lawyer must collaborate with client communities on specific issues. 53 This is a point where community lawyering and collaborative lawyering merge with each other and blur the ownership of the movement when the lawyer is not cautious enough.
Tensions of the Amalgamation: ‘Indirect Disempowerment’
In both community and collaborative lawyering, there is a pre-existing community grappling with human rights issues. The community often may also already have some kind of movement, campaign or strategy in operation. This community vision determines if they will accept or reject the lawyer’s offer of support or partnership, 54 when the lawyer/organization steps into the enterprise. This is collaborative lawyering, and this entrance can have twofold impact on the power relations: either there will be collaboration on equal footing and power sharing between the community and the lawyer to converge their visions and strategies or the community will treat the lawyer as their big chance of succeeding. 55
The latter impact snatches the power play from their control to place it with the lawyer. This can indirectly disempower the community. By ‘indirect disempowerment, I mean stagnation and passive participation’ of the community. The organization does not manipulate or control the community, neither does it disregard or devalue the community’s opinions. On the contrary, an empathetic and conscious organization such as the EELC can be very enthusiast to involve the community. But, EELC’s existence, accompanied by the Harvard IHRC, often means that the strategies, decisions and tactics are being fixed by the ‘outsider lawyering organisations’ (both EELC and IHRC) which the community is just following and executing. The community does express its opinion, does get involved in the process, but all of this happens pursuant to the organization’s decisions. So, the community is placed at the forefront, ‘but their process of empowerment becomes stagnant’. They share the stage, but their capacity to organize and fight for their own cause does not develop further from that point, leading to indirect disempowerment.
On the other hand, the clinical students are learning about the community lawyering tactics on a theoretical basis but their engagement is confined to drafting memos for potential campaign strategies. This deprives the students from learning how to practice community lawyering in ESCR issues. One of the main goals of clinical pedagogy would be ‘turning the students into good community organizers’. Thus, while in community lawyering there should be empowerment of the stakeholders, the clinical pedagogy in contexts similar to the IHRC project does not equip the students with enough experience to be able to later build community leaders in future.
This is where a balance is required to create community empowerment and an effective clinical pedagogy.
How the Amalgam of the Two Advocacy Strategies Benefits the Cause
The Geographic Distance
I found the presence of community-based approaches with transnational lawyering in the project very valuable and effective, but not without demerits. The very nature of lawyers’ activities often prevent them from truly engaging in promoting the community’s interests: Elsesser in his article mentions how advocates deeply committed to the social justice fail to be most effective due to their vague idea of social change and community experience. 56 Lawyer’s detachment from community life requires the community to itself describe its worst problems.
The IHRC could not possibly step into the shoes of the target group, not least due to the geographical, political, cultural and social differences and distances. 57 Empathy is required to comprehend the community so as to solve the problem as the community would have done, instead of solving the problem ‘for them’. If the IHRC and EELC only used community lawyering as a tactic, then it would have hindered the community from attaining optimum benefits because in that case, the clinic would be lawyering for a cause of which the clinic has little experience. As such, the IHRC, to maximize its engagement and service, should do what it does best: analyze and design the advocacy campaign and policy issues.
This is where EELC can be most useful—being on the ground, involving the rights holders directly and sharing a connection with the cause—for the rights in question affect the whole future generation, and as a South African organization, EELC can understand the ground reality and issues at stake on a deeper and more pragmatic level.
Establishing Trust
EELC had kicked off with the project with a very strong foot: they had a clear vision of their goals, that is, securing state-provided scholar transport. Tactics used shifted from one to another from time to time, such as from community meetings, publishing op-eds in the media to presenting memos and testimonies to the government for filing cases. The juxtaposition of the issues with EELC’s prior success with the norms and standards movement created their credibility as a human rights advocate. This was crucial from two perspectives: it helped EELC gain trust of the rights holders to build their constituency and also attracted the attention of the stakeholders who considered EELC worth their time and attention to reply to EELC’s queries, demands and questions as evident from the DOE (Departnment of Education) response with providing buses to the three schools in Nquthu. This credibility is the starting point of the community lawyering.
Empowerment: The Demarcating Line between Community and Collaborative Lawyering
The question that becomes most apparent here is what is the difference? In theories of practice, community lawyering focuses on building trust and empowerment, while collaborative lawyering engages clients as problem-solving partners. 58
I want to emphasize the word ‘empowerment’. I submit that failing to execute the balance between collaborative lawyers and stakeholders will result in disempowerment despite community lawyering. This is what I have termed as ‘indirect disempowerment’.
Indirect Disempowerment: Whether the Community is an Active or a Passive Actor in the Project?
During collaborative lawyering, it is easy to lose touch with community when working in the halls of power (as the clinic as part of HLS and EELC as a major pro bono organization do enjoy), even though the lawyers intend to transfer the power to the community. Unless the community members play the central role in community empowerment, there will be no building bridges with the subordinated people. 59
Undoubtedly, the project draws its strength from having the rights-holder community placed on the front row. However, the clinical students can ask themselves, as I did, if being on centre stage is enough. If it is EELC and EE who ‘ensure’ the community takes the centre stage by ‘placing’ them there, then it is a passive participation for the community which affects the dynamics of power relation with and within the community.
Engaging in community lawyering preconceives ‘knowing the community’. Often the ambits of community lawyering are challenged on the ground that the concerned community is rather superficially ‘created’ by the lawyers to serve their (lawyers’) own agenda.
While designing the campaign, it was a challenge for IHRC to determine whether the South African students considered themselves to be a community, or was it the EELC who as advocates targeted the scholars as a community. However, since students in all the provinces of South Africa shared a common space of deprivation due to absence of scholar transport, and the educational institutes and parents also came within the periphery, it satisfied the qualities of being a community. 60
Since any decision on scholar transport issue would affect all the learners to a similar extent, when it comes to own the advocacy, this community occupies a dual position.
On one hand, the project was inspired by the community reflections, on the other it was EELC behind the design and control of the overall advocacy campaign. It is an EELC tactic to put the community in the front row; EELC’s presence is passive, its role is secondary. EELC is the central mover and shaker, yet acts on a complementary basis.
The community itself is not the central driving force in the advocacy as of yet, and even EELC acknowledges this phenomenon: EELC makes it a point to identify that while they focus on amplifying the voices of the community and enhance their agency through this process, actual empowerment in the sense that the community itself can take forward the demands and campaign on the scholar transport issue requires something more. According to EELC members, L. Draga and S. Joseph, this can only happen if the community takes ownership of the issue:
They need to realise that the demanding what is rightfully theirs (the community’s) is their responsibility. The EELC can support them with litigation and bring about necessary change but that can only happen if there is buy in from them.
61
Illustrating the Disempowerment in Clinical Project
One specific event is pertinent to exemplify the concept of disempowerment and necessity of more pertinent transnational clinical pedagogy. In November 2014, EELC gathered testimonies from the learners in Secondary School, KZN by distributing open-ended questionnaires. The responses of the students on certain questions are completely identical, including linguistic and grammatical structures. EELC analyzes this situation in two ways: either the weak students took help from the less weak and copied their answers or the briefing session by EELC manipulated their independent responses. This manipulation would display the hindering of expression of independent opinion and is a perfect example of how the presence of lawyering organization has influenced the community. EELC should demarcate between ‘active and passive allies’, 62 channel the control properly and a potential strategy would be to leave the movement completely to equalizers while IHRC and EELC take the backstage to provide input, analyze the activities of equalizers and give feedback, and if necessary, prepare for litigation. In fact, to ensure client-centred advocacy, EELC requires their advocates to counsel the community about how choosing between various strategic decisions might affect the community’s immediate interests. 63
Therefore, although it can be said that there is a tension between the theory and practice in the present case, there can be some positive changes coming through.
The IHRC Project Dissolving the Tension by Empowerment Lawyering
It is precisely for this tension and the positive changes that the IHRC project becomes a model of empowerment lawyering. It is an illustration of the broad spectrum under which human rights advocacy works: it often takes time to build up momentum for a socio-economic right cause, and the path towards community involvement is cumbersome. EELC knew that and, hence, had the equalizers in team. When I first started drafting this article, EELC was preparing a brief for the school governing bodies (SGBs) to receive full authority to act on SGB’s behalf. 64 This move prepared the way for litigation which may be filed soon in Spring 2016. If the movement moves into litigation, then EELC must hand over the campaign to EE so that firstly the community does not get detached and secondly the movement does not get confined to the courtroom. The demarcation between lawyer’s role by EELC and IHRC and the community leader’s role by EE will at the end determine how much ownership will finally reside with the rights holders themselves. 65 From a critical perspective, this campaign is still in a nascent stage, and a big way has to be covered before it takes a ripe form. According to EELC, knowing that the present students may not benefit immediately but the movement would definitely benefit future students is a key aspect of empowerment, which EELC considers a great success. In the meantime, EELC is speculative in transferring the ownership. The sooner the transfer takes place, the better the empowerment will root into the community.
Concluding Observations: The Path towards Empowerment
Community lawyering does shift the balance of power between lawyer and client. As discussed, once the community learns to understand that it must be for them to take forward the movement, there will be a shift in the ownership and consequently the momentum. The EE is the bridge here. In order to ensure that the transition does take place, EELC must ensure the following: educating the community on the issue, making them aware of best practices and similar examples from other communities, building up confidence so that the community speaks on their own and finally the community must learn to implement strategies themselves. In doing so, the strategies developed by the IHRC can be forwarded to them, and upon mutual discussion those can be adopted. The role played by the IHRC here is to supplement, complement and fortify that of the community, and the activities done by the IHRC does not hinder empowerment, rather they provide the necessary tools, for example, campaign ideas, slogans, model plan of actions, etc. to accelerate the process. The important thing that remains to be done is that how EELC manoeuvres the equalizers and these other tools to accomplish the goals.
As concluding remarks, I would again emphasize that the SVS structure has entrenched itself deep into our minds such that even community lawyering sometimes goes back to fortify the concept. EELC, with time, can ensure that this does not happen with learners, and that is possible when EELC will help them stand up, and once stood, EELC will let them be.