The challenges that women, children, the elderly and youth face in accessing justice remains significant in Kenya. To tackle the challenges of accessing justice, implements effective strategies such as self-representation, legal aid and support, alternative dispute resolution and psycho-social support. These strategies will integrates special groups such as key populations, domestic workers, adolescent mothers and PWDs.
Legal Aid and Support Scheme.
Under this strategy, KARE partners with legal experts, to provide legal representation, legal advice and support targeting individuals and communities who are unable to pay for legal services at the commercial rate. This scheme also involves training of community paralegals to offer basic legal aid and support.
Self-representation
This empowering intervention entails training the target beneficiaries on how to represent themselves in court while seeking redress for violation of their rights. This is a comparatively cost-effective approach to helping poor children, the elderly, the youth and women to access justice without engaging a lawyer.
Alternative Dispute Resolution
KARE’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) strategies provide a comparatively efficient mechanism for resolving disputes between and among individuals. This initiative provides clients with the opportunity to amicably resolve disputes while enhancing unity and mutual respect among family members (or parties to the dispute). This allows the parties to voluntarily engage in a process that allows them to come up with their own tailor-made solutions and resolutions. This initiative also involves sensitizing and create awareness to communities on the usefulness and benefits of alternative dispute resolution mechanism. Under this initiative, the organization trains and keeps a team of mediators to extend mediation services to a wider population.
Psycho-social Support
This support sub-programme is implemented through individual and group therapy sessions using in-house and external counsellors and psychosocial caregivers. This initiative enables survivors of violations to cope with the situation and to heal.