THE CLIENT
Justice Defenders is an international NGO operating in Kenya and Uganda. The charity provides legal aid services to ensure that everyone has a fair hearing. Justice Defenders take the unique approach of training prison officers and prisoners to become paralegals. Through their scalable model, the charity is able to provide legal aid to thousands of inmates in East Africa. The charity has fundraising offices in the UK and USA.
THE CHALLENGE
Justice Defenders were using a system of paper-based books and spreadsheets to keep track of the thousands of clients to whom they provide legal aid. This made reporting difficult as tracing outcomes to specific cases required digging through records stored in filing cabinets.
THE SOLUTION
We mapped each programme of work within Justice Defenders to the Makerble Architecture. We specified how each of their forms, reports and access restrictions could be managed using components on Makerble.
Makerble is a cloud-based platform with a companion Android App that works offline on smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks and Windows-based laptops. This means that paralegals in prison with access to a laptop can now register new clients and manage their existing cases without needing to use paper.
The Makerble Offline Android App showing sample data
THE RESULT
Justice Defenders now have live dashboards that show them the case management activity happening within prisons and the outcomes being achieved. This information allows the Senior Management Team to make data-driven decisions and provides the fundraising team with the monitoring data they need to report back to funders and court new ones.
An example of a report dashboard generated with The Boards App on Makerble
The Legal Practice Team within Justice Defenders now have greater oversight of the work being done by their paralegals spread across prisons in East Africa. Legal Aid Supervisors can now directly comment on cases and provide advice to paralegals remotely whereas before this would have required in-person meetings and only happened on the days that the supervisor was at that prison. Now the Legal Aid Supervisors can feed into cases at any time from wherever they are.
