Justice for All: Reflections on legal awareness, community power, and what happens when people know their rights

The Liberian peace activist and Nobel laureate, Leymah Gbowee, is often found in her speeches echoing the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Peace is not just the absence of war. Peace is the presence of justice.” The words come from his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.

For many people, justice is imagined as something distant. It exists in courtrooms, in legal books, in the language of lawyers and judges, in government buildings and policies ordinary people may never read. But in reality, justice also exists in smaller and quieter moments. It exists in whether a woman can stand as surety for her child. It exists in whether a person knows they cannot legally be arrested in place of another person. It exists in whether someone understands the difference between a civil dispute and a criminal offence. It exists in whether communities know what the law says before their rights are violated.

This understanding sits at the centre of the Justice for All project implemented by Isa Wali Empowerment Initiative.

The project, implemented with support from the European Union and International IDEA through the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption (RoLAC) Programme, began as a one-month intervention in 2024. Seeing the impact and the success recorded within that time, it was then expanded into a second phase across five local government areas in Kano State: Bichi, Dawakin Tofa, Rano, Ungogo and Wudil.

At first glance, the project may appear to simply be about awareness creation around the Kano State Administration of Criminal Justice Law (ACJL) 2019. But over time, what became clearer to us was that legal awareness is never simply about information. It is about power. It is about confidence. It is about whether people can recognise injustice when it happens to them. It is about whether communities can question practices they have normalised for years simply because they did not know alternatives existed.

Across communities, schools, correctional facilities and public spaces, we repeatedly encountered the same reality: many violations people experience are sustained in part by institutional weakness, but mostly by lack of access to legal knowledge. And once people begin to know the law, something begins to shift.

In April 2026, IWEI visited Government Girls Arabic Secondary School in Dawakin Tofa LGA, Kano State. Earlier in January, the team had conducted a sensitisation session in the school where students were introduced to some of the key provisions of the ACJL.

When we returned months later, the intention was to know what had stayed with them. What they had remembered and shared within their peers and communities? What had mattered enough to carry beyond the walls of the sensitisation?

One of the students we met was Ummahani*. She smiled when we asked if she still remembered the session. Then, counting on her fingers, she listed the provisions that she not only remembered, but had shared with her family and friends;  Women can stand as sureties; No arrest in lieu; No arrest for civil wrongs; Everyone has a right to a lawyer.

What stood out was not simply that she remembered them. It was the specificity of what she remembered and why. When we asked her why those provisions mattered to her, she explained that in her community, she had seen people arrested in the absence of actual suspects. She had seen situations where women were denied the opportunity to stand as sureties because they were women. She had also seen disputes that were not criminal matters become police cases.

These were not abstract legal concepts to her. They were things she had witnessed around her. She also told us she had shared what she learned with her peers and people in her community. One of the hijabs distributed during the project carried a key message from the ACJL. Hers read: Women can stand as sureties.

People retained provisions they connected with

What became increasingly evident across the project was that people often retained the provisions that connected most directly to their lived realities.

For many women, the provision on women standing as sureties generated the strongest reaction. Our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning findings showed that more than 60% of the women we engaged were particularly interested in this provision.

This was not difficult to understand. In many households and communities, women are often the ones managing the immediate emotional and social consequences of conflict. They are the ones trying to secure bail for relatives. They are the ones moving between police stations, homes and family members trying to resolve issues quietly before they escalate. They are often central to preserving the family unit, yet they are simultaneously excluded from certain processes because of assumptions about gender.

For some women, learning that the law recognised them as eligible sureties was not merely informative. It disrupted something they had long accepted as normal. And that disruption matters. Because one of the things this project repeatedly revealed is that injustice often survives through normalisation. People begin to believe certain violations are simply “how things are done.” Until someone tells them otherwise.

The mobility of Knowledge

One of the things we learned quickly was that legal awareness does not move in straight lines. People do not simply attend a sensitisation, absorb information and stop there.

Knowledge travels. It moves through conversations, arguments, marketplaces, schools, families, mosques, radio programmes, peer groups and ordinary interactions.

In Bichi, we met a middle-aged woman, Hajiya Umma*, who had attended one of our sensitisation sessions and received one of the project hijabs carrying legal awareness messages. She told us she was walking through the market one day when another woman saw the hijab and accused her of spreading false information because it stated that women could stand as sureties.

Hajiya Umma recognised this as an opportunity and what followed was a conversation. She explained the provision to her and spoke about what she had learned during the sensitisation.

In many ways, that moment reflects how social change often begins. Not always through formal institutions, or through large campaigns. Sometimes through ordinary people carrying information into everyday spaces. One woman correcting another woman in a market. One student speaking to her peers. One conversation shifting what another person believes is impossible. This became especially visible through the project’s communication strategies.

The methods we deployed

Beyond physical sensitisation sessions, the Justice for All project experimented with different ways of carrying legal information into communities.

We used radio programmes, gramophone announcements, posters, billboards, hijabs carrying key legal messages, and stickers placed on the backs of tricycles across Kano. We also produced a short film, Abokin Kowa, which became central to many of the sensitisation sessions.

Usually, sessions began with an introduction to the ACJL before screening the film, Abokin Kowa. Afterwards, lawyers from the Legal Aid Council, who consistently supported the project by providing lawyers for sensitisation sessions and legal clinics, would engage participants in discussions and answer questions.

Watch Abokin Kowa

Alongside these sessions, legal clinics were also conducted so participants needing legal advice could access support directly.

What became apparent over time was that people often engage legal information more openly when it is presented in familiar and accessible forms and this was especially true in rural communities.

Our paralegal in Bichi, Mallama Halima, reflected on this while discussing the use of radio and gramophone campaigns.

She said, “You don’t even know and I will tell you. People in the rural areas of Bichi listened on the radio, some other people called cause they heard on the gramophone. They gathered themselves and invited me to come and tell them about the ACJL. As I am talking to you now, they have decided to form a group and spread the word while holding law enforcement officers accountable to the law. We must all know our rights”

Her reflection captures something important. Often, conversations around justice assume that people in rural or underserved communities are passive recipients of information. But what we repeatedly witnessed was initiative. People were organising, asking questions, inviting paralegals into their communities and carrying information forward themselves.

The project reminded us that communities are not empty spaces waiting to be “fixed.” They already contain systems of influence, leadership and communication. Once information enters those systems meaningfully, communities themselves begin to extend the work.

*Names marked with an asterisk have been changed for privacy and protection reasons.

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