How are Justice-Changemakers consciously working towards identifying gaps in the existing law and justice machinery, and how are they activating the agency of the citizens towards social justice transformations?
Tracking common patterns and innovations in approaches adopted by different stakeholders to create a widespread change in the law and justice ecosystem.
An interactive dashboard to help Justice-Changemakers in their journeys, by providing a library of curated resources, a tool to learn about their network, and indicators to measure their initiatives' impact
Explore our curated lists of relevant publications, databases, courses, best practices, tech solutions, recent happenings from the law and justice ecosystem!
We equip leading social entrepreneurs in India who are shifting mindsets and making societal systems change towards equitable access to justice. We do this by facilitating tacit exchange of knowledge and resources, creating new avenues for collaborations and fostering collective impact.
Unlocking Impact in Justice
How do social entrepreneurs view changemaking in law and justice? What do they envision the roadmap to justice to be? We launched this initiative to understand answers to these questions and build tools to help justice-changemakers innovate towards realising social justice.
We enable spaces that invigorate young people that have found their power to create change for the good, and further boost these young changemakers' movements towards justice.
We aim to develop an ecosystem of leading social entrepreneurs and critical sector catalysts. In line with that, we search, select, and support social entrepreneurs and young changemakers and their innovations.
Fostering Social Innovations in the Law and Justice Sector
An overwhelming majority of Indians do not have access to justice. Government mechanisms and entitlements reach only a tiny percentage of citizens. While some social innovations have made progress and reached thousands, we still have a very long way to go to address the needs of 1.3 billion people. We have realised that only through the potential of every citizen as a changemaker can we mount a genuinely scalable and systemic response to the diversity and size of problems pertaining to access to justice. In India, this is particularly true given its diversity, inequalities and power structures.
We at Ashoka established the Law for All Initiative (LFA) in 2020 to catalyse the network of law and justice social entrepreneurs who are shifting mindsets by building social innovations for their communities.
Our ecosystem is established with three building blocks - a collective of leading social entrepreneurs, critical sector catalysts and influencers, and a growing movement of young justice changemakers. This ecosystem, equipped with powerful ideas such as the collaborative resolution of disputes, open access to law and justice data, well-being in criminal justice systems, and community justice solutions, can achieve widespread and irreversible impact.
We are helping strengthen the programme of Justice-Changemakers in various fields through our Venture and Fellowship and the Ashoka Young Changemakers initiatives. Additionally, we are currently mapping the thematic underpinnings of various sectoral issues and the vast array of social innovations pioneered by Justice-Changemakers. In our mission to achieve the idea of ‘Everyone A Changemaker™’ (EACH), we are also actively expanding our support for grassroots leadership by young innovators and partnering with other Ashoka Fellow-led organisations. This site is a portal for our past and present work, failures, and successes.
India is home to over 900,000 sex workers, with rampant sex trafficking of minors. The laws that aim to prevent trafficking and sex work do little to protect sex workers and have severe repercussions...
This 6-part series in the India Development Review by Law for All seeks to highlight lessons and insights on the law and justice space in India. Part 1: Entrepreneurs shaping the law and justice space...
Kolkata-based social entrepreneur Smita Chakraburtty got a strange call one day as she was crisscrossing India researching inhumane conditions in prisons. The director general of Rajasthan's prisons...
When the pandemic hit India, many of the country’s policies around vaccine roll-outs, online education and welfare services assumed universal Internet access and literacy. Yet, only 65% of households...
Casteist discrimination in India was codified into law in 1871 by the British colonial authorities when they enacted the Criminal Tribes Act branding several nomadic and tribal communities as...
Every year Ashoka Fellow Apar Gupta's organisation IFF hosts their flagship event, ‘Privacy Supreme’, to commemorate the anniversary of the landmark decision of the Supreme Court of India in K.S...
In direct action areas, systems change happens through enabling young people. All we do is just give them a little nudge to start thinking that they don’t have to live the life given to them. And that they can write their own life script.
Paramita Banerjee
Founder, DIKSHA
अगर किसी को पता होगा कि बाल मज़दूरी गलत है, तभी तो वह बाल मज़दूरी छोड़ कर पढ़ेगा
Translation from Hindi: Only when the unaware youth is made aware of the fact that child labour is wrong, will they leave child labour to focus on education.
Priyaswara Bharti
Founder, Bihar Youth for Child Rights
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