We’re pleased to share that HiiL’s 2024 Annual Report and Accounts is now published!
Titled “Igwe wu ike: The Power of Many”, this year’s report captures the essence of what drives our mission: collaboration. Rooted in an expression from a village in South East Nigeria, “Igwe wu ike” reminds us that there is more power in many than in one. It’s this belief that guided our work throughout 2024, a year of both collective progress and global challenges. These included a seventh consecutive year of rule of law recession, eroding trust in institutions, and increased social unrest. Despite foreign aid budget cuts and complexities in the environments where we work, however, we saw signs of hope, willing partners, and a growing understanding of what it takes to rebuild trust and strengthen societies. Our report details how, together with our partners, we renewed our focus on turning solutions into action.
A Year of Collective Progress
Across all areas of our work, we focused on enabling justice systems to meet people where they are—rooted in lived experience, informed by robust data, and implemented through partnerships. The report explores four core pillars of our impact:
- Delivering data and insights: Publishing nine new Justice Needs and Satisfaction (JNS) studies and providing training to over 230 practitioners on using data to inform justice services.
- Building practitioner capacity: Delivered hand on training to over 1,000 justice providers based on context-specific guidelines.
- Accelerating innovation: Supported 220 justice entrepreneurs at the ideation stage, incubated 30 startups, accelerated 12 and helped 5 scale their services. Our investments enabled justice providers to potentially prevent or resolve issues affecting 283,323 people—54% of whom were women.
- Piloting people-centred services: Local justice providers in Tunisia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Niger began piloting solutions co-developed through Justice Innovation Labs convened by HiiL, addressing urgent issues like land conflict, labour disputes, and community justice. These pilots mark a major milestone in our collaboration and a strong push for people-centred change at the national level.
- Fostering dialogue for change: In Tunisia, Burkina Faso, Niger, Uganda and Syria, we brought key players together around national priorities and data insights to create an environment where people-centred justice and innovation can thrive.
- Global momentum for people-centred justice: We strengthened global and regional alliances including the Justice Action Coalition and the African Alliance for People-centred justice, to advance access to justice through evidence-based, people-centred approaches.
Justice in Practice:
Our work in 2024 spanned ten countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. In each, we collaborated closely with national and local stakeholders to drive people-centred change.
Some highlights include:
- In Niger, we developed guidelines for traditional leaders on resolving land conflicts and launched an AI-powered legal support phone line to disseminate them to traditional leaders in remote areas.
- In Tunisia, we co-developed a digital platform in partnership with the Tunisian Labour Inspection and the Ministry of Social Affairs focused on work-related conflict prevention. In Nigeria, we provided hands on training on our Family Justice and Land guidelines supporting over 1,000 individuals in improving dispute management.
- In Iraq innovations lead by civil society organizations such as mobile legal clinics and AI-based legal information tools provided critical access to justice for underserved communities.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to our work in 2024—our team, partners, funders, and the communities we work with—your collaboration made these achievements possible.
