On 26 November 2014, five winners of the Innovating Justice Awards went home with a total of €160.000 in seed-investments to kickstart their projects. In this blog, we look at the progress of JUST, WageIndicator Foundation and Accountability Lab, and learn more about their next steps.
Winners of the Innovating Justice Awards 2014
Made in Africa won the Living Wage Innovation Challenge and received €50,000 from the C&A Foundation. JUST received €30,000 and the WageIndicator Foundation received €20,000 to continue their mission. Kanan Dhru’s LawForMe won the Innovating Justice Awards and received a total of €40,000 from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and HiiL. Blair Glencorse got a special investment of €20,000 from the Dutch Ministry to scale the Community Justice Teams that his organisation trains in Liberia.
JUST
Natalie Grillon and Shahd ElShehail are working on their first iterations as we speak. They are currently visiting a supplier factory in India. JUST tells the stories behind clothing, Natalie and Shahd explain, with easy-to-access data. The investment of the C&A Foundation allows Natalie and Shahd to pilot their survey with factory workers. They have also started work on the IT development design of their application. Over the next few months, they are running a new pilot and will continue developing their data aggregation methods and consumer facing material.
WageIndicator Foundation
Paulien Osse and her team could choose from a list of many countries to implement their programme. The WageIndicator Foundation runs its Wages in Context programme in over 60 countries. They have an extensive database of up-to-date monthly living wages and other statistics for many industries and countries. Their database provides a fact-based tool that makes realistic negotiations on wages possible. This data is needed during wage negotiations, for example between factory owners and workers or workers’ associations, when they need to determine how high a living wage actually is in a specific local context.
Last year, the WageIndicator Foundation went to Mozambique, as winners of the 2013 Awards. This year, they decided to use the funds to deploy their living wage measuring tool in Indonesia. In fact, they go beyond the numbers and also train trade union negotiators and employers on how to use the available data to set up fair living wages for their workers.
Community Justice Teams
Blair Glencorse has been travelling the world since November, even making his way to Davos for the World Economic Forum. Blair and his team at the Accountability Lab train local Community Justice Teams on mediating disputes in Liberia. They have continued to do so amidst the Ebola crisis, which has created a wide range of legal problems. This indeed underlines the need of such programmes during early post-crisis recovery. Though there are hopeful signs of recovery, Ebola continues to take its toll on the societies in West Africa. Blair and his colleagues remain positive about ‘The Ebola Opportunity’. Over the next few months, the Community Justice Teams will expand to two new communities in Monrovia, West Point and Logal Town. They also continue to look for international partnerships with the goal of scaling Community Justice Teams with other communities and countries.
