Part III: Project Achievements, Results
3.0 Provision of Legal Aid
The Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and Gender-Based Violence (GBV)
project has a focus to improve utilisation of comprehensive quality services for protection,
care and support for GBV survivors in accordance with the National Gender-Based
Violence Strategy. The three organisations identified gaps and challenges, including poor
service delivery, coverage, and human capacity competencies which had continued to
undermine comprehensive access to justice and support for GBV survivors.
To address these challenges, the project has been working on mitigating the effects of
gender-based violence on adolescent girls and young women by scaling up provision of
comprehensive survivor sensitive legal services in the three districts. Strategies included
legal awareness campaigns to enhance legal aid, capacity building of CFPs and realigning them
with existing government structures, strengthening of support groups targeting GBV
survivors, documentation, strengthened responses at community level, gender-sensitive legal
information centres and decentralized access to legal services through the provision of legal
aid mobile clinics to complement government’s Legal Aid Directorate. Legal aid services
have been provided at district courts, in areas where the courts sit as circuit courts and in
the communities through the mobile clinic and CFPs approaches.
As a result of the project interventions, there has been a remarkable change in community
awareness regarding legal issues. A cumulative total of 4,067 clients were assisted with legal
services in different GBV cases, surpassing a planned project figure of 1,440 women and
children.3 The partners used dialogues and empowerment sessions that resulted in cases
requiring legal aid being referred to by respective people, such as traditional leaders.
The partners’ legal aid activities gave advice to clients, drafting court papers, empowering
clients in maintenance and domestic violence cases, court monitoring as well as
representation.
Legal aid clinics and help desks reached 3, 519 community members (1,050 women, 140
men, 981 girls and 674 boys).
The following is a sample feature story focusing on one of the CFPs’ work on legal aid in
Bindura:
3
UN Women Partners’ Consolidated Monitoring Report, October 2014-March 2016.
Select target paragraph3
Add to table of contents