Mid-Term Evaluation of the Performance of the National Legal Aid Clinic for Women (NLACW) under the Clinic’s Strategic Plan 2007 – 2011

The Project

The project supports the National Legal Aid Clinic for Women (NLACW or the Clinic), created in 1990 by the Law Association of Zambia. NLACW provides affordable legal services to vulnerable members of the Zambian society, especially to women and children. The Clinic is supported by various cooperating partners, amongst them legal and bar associations from overseas and the governments of Norway, Sweden and Netherlands. The annual budget for 2008 was more than 1 mill USD. The connection with cooperation partners introduced strategic plans to help realise its goals and expansion strategy.

Interesting Findings

• The provision of legal services provided by the Clinic is generally very much appreciated by members of the target groups and by the courts (judges and magistrates). During the period under review over 15,000 cases were handled with over 2,635 taken to court, 9,500 cases settled excuria. There is general consensus that the work of the Clinic responds very well to the needs of the indigent members of the communities. The Clinic appears to work as a redistribution machine, which by recourse to the law in the case of marital and inheritance issues supports vulnerable women and children in Zambia. It thus supports the rule of law in Zambia.

• The community outreach programme is one of the best implemented programmes of the Clinic. It covers radio programmes, community and school programmes as well as mobile clinics. School programmes on average directly reach over 3,000 pupils in a year. The radio programmes are estimated to reach over 200,000 people in a week, and community programmes reach on average 1,500 people in a year. In addition, the Clinic networks with several but relevant government institutions and NGOs in the same field.

• In terms of advocacy, the Clinic actively participates in key institutions dealing with law reform (such as the Zambia Law Development Commission) and it participates in making submissions to Parliamentary Committees especially the Legal Affairs, Governance, Human Rights and Gender Matters Committees

• In the fields of governance and management, the Clinic did not perform according to its strategic plan 2007 – 2011, which was basically due to misconceptions about the corporate culture of the clinic in the plan itself.

• The clinic has not performed well in the development of monitoring tools and in the actual monitoring of activities, mainly due to capacity constraints in terms of personnel (skeleton staff especially in 2007 and 2008) and ability to develop monitoring tools and undertaking monitoring itself.

• There is great need and demand for the services of the clinic in both the areas it is currently operating and in those that it is not yet present. This demand for expansion whilst being a felt need, the clinic needs to attend to some of its weak areas e.g. in the areas of governance, monitoring, staff levels and capacity, etc before embarking on expansion.