West Africa Legal Empowerment Network in partnership with the Legal Empowerment Fund will hold a Learning Exchange on the theme “Building Community Power to Fight Injustice”
Virtual Sessions (April- June 2023)
In person session (4th - 11th June 2023), Kano, Nigeria.
“A community that is empowered is a community that has the ability to recognize the problem they are facing. They are able to come together, organize themselves, mobilize themselves around the problem and raise their voices until action is taken and also to ensure that once that action has been taken, they create systems and structures to ensure that they don’t revert to the problem they had initially.” Evans Otibine, Akiba Mashinani Trust
Across our Network, different organizations are looking for ways to help people recognize a common struggle and equip themselves to act together for change. In this learning exchange, we want to have a deeper conversation on what it means to build community power, how we are combining law and community organizing approaches, and how these approaches deepen our work at the grassroots level and drive systemic changes to injustices.
Selected members of the West Africa Legal Empowerment Network and grantees of the Legal Empowerment Fund grantees will participate in this learning exchange. They will then share learnings and best practices with other organizations within their respective Networks.
The exchange will be hosted by the Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative in their capacity as the regional lead of WALEN. Participants will also get a better understanding of what building community power looks like in practice through site-visits to see the work of three organizations in Kano— PRAWA, Civil Society Organizations for Conflict Resolution in Nigeria (CS-CRIN) and Human Rights Network Nigeria.
The virtual and in-person sessions of the learning exchange will kick-start exchange and shared learning among practitioners. After the exchange, we hope that participants will share learnings within their teams and collaborate with their colleagues to apply the ideas and practices learned to address their teams’ current challenges. The learning exchange is a space for us to share practical, and action-oriented learning with each other, and use the learning to deepen our daily practice. @AimeeOngeso @aminahanga @AnnetteMbogoh @POSJonathan @EnockJengre @MarkDodoo @marlonmanuel @michaelotto @martaalmela @LynnKamande @jabobs @andrewmaki @akhila_kolisetty @AakritiShrivastava @aishakhagai @Fatima @BatimainYARO @sarahkamara @GraceAppolos