Who will help the teams to develop their ideas?
Inclusive justice
7 teams from Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, North Macedonia, Kenya, Tanzania and Sierra Leone will participate in the Kyiv Legal Empowerment Practical Program this year. The main topic for this year is “The role of (non)lawyers in the inclusive justice ecosystem”.
“Non” here is in a parenthesis, because we are interested in paralegals, social workers, legal tech, and legal practitioners as well, – Kateryna Yeroshenko, the coordinator of the Kyiv Legal Empowerment Practical Program clarified. We are focusing on addressing public health and social issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we want to share our experience of two years of public health emergency, and solutions which could change the future”.
According to Kateryna Yeroshenko, since the beginning of the pandemic, it has become more complicated to get legal aid, and at the same time the situation with domestic violence has worsened. This year, one of the teams from Ukraine applied to KyivLEPP to develop a technological solution to combine the services of the state funded legal aid with the services of the paralegal community. The teams also drew attention to the problems of refugees to obtain documents during the COVID-19 pandemic and problems of people who work informally.
Design sprint
In KyivLEPP-2021 the work on developing ideas to solve legal issues has already begun at the stage of submitting applications. During the design-thinking process, teams will start from the empathy stage, so it means that each of 7 teams will conduct interviews with the representatives of target audiences to understand how the team’s idea sounds to them. For example, participants from Kenya who try to solve problems with documents for refugees in the Somali community, will go through the “refugee path” to obtain a passport. By this means, the team will identify key difficulties along the way.
The stage of empathy will last all this week until the start of the program, on December 13. Then the sprint design begins. The moderator of the KyivLEPP-2021 will explain in detail what design-thinking is and why this method is used to build human-centered solutions. Then, during five days the teams will go through each of the stages of design-thinking: problem definition, inventing a solution, prototyping, crash testing.
Who will help teams?
This year, the founder of DOT_DOT innovation, PR agency HOSHVA PR and the digital marketing agency HOSHVA DIGITAL Oksana Goshva will help in conducting design-sprint. She was the first in Ukraine who organized a design- sprint using the Google Ventures method and she is also a co-author of the design-thinking course offered at KyivLEPP – 2021.
Participants of the KyivLEPP – 2021 will receive expert support from partners and experts of the Kyiv Legal Empowerment Practical Program, as well as the International Club of Innovators of Access to Justice – Club Justice. Separate thematic sessions are planned for each team. For example, the Sierra Leone team, which deals with the rights of domestic workers, will work with experts on informal employment and the gig economy.
This week is the organizers will hold the selection of mentors for the KyivLEPP – 2021. Among the key requirements for being a mentor -be experienced in at least one of the topics stated by KyivLEPP participants. After completing the design thinking course, they will periodically meet with their teams online (for 6 months) to provide advice and advice on the implementation of the prototype implementation plan.
“KyivLEPP’s main goal is not only to hold design – sprint and develop a great plan to implement the idea of solving a access to justice problem, but to ensure that the ideas are human-centered and that they are implemented. Our program is a platform where ideas are brought to a state that would allow to do so at least in part. Last year we managed to develop such solutions together with all five teams of KyivLEPP-2020,” said Kateryna Yeroshenko.
The KyivLEPP program is implemented by the Ukrainian Access to Justice School of Practice through the co-creation of colleagues from the Ukrainian Legal Aid Foundation, the Coordination Center on Legal Aid Provision, the Legal Development Network, the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, the PRAVOKATOR.Kyiv Law Club and the expert and financial support of the Human rights and justice program of the International Renaissance Foundation, with the participation of Dot_Dot innovations, HiiL, Kyiv Legal Hackers, Pathfinders for peaceful just and inclusive societies and PilNET.