The Equality Effect and Justice in Africa

The Equality Effect is a non-profit charity that uses international human rights law as a crowbar to pry open justice for women and girls around the world. Drawing on a team of feisty international lawyers, the equality effect supports its regional legal partners by initiating creative legal advocacy projects to achieve systemic change. In Kenya, The Equality Effect provided support for a constitutional claim against the government for failing to protect girls who had been raped; in May 2013, Kenya’s High Court agreed that the police failure to enforce existing rape laws, and police failure to protect them from rape, is a violation of domestic, regional, and human rights law. The work that led to this landmark ruling informs the equality effect’s newest project in Malawi that also seeks justice for victims of rape.

As three-time Amnesty International Media award-winner and author Sally Armstrong writes: “Once, in a very long while, maybe once in a lifetime, you get to witness a story that shifts the way an entire country or continent sees itself. The process of change is usually daring, certainly time-consuming, invariably costly, occasionally heart-breaking, and eventually an exercise so rewarding that it is the stuff of legends; this is the story of the equality effect.”