81298204 - Promotion of Rule of Law and Judiciary in Africa

Kurze Beschreibung

Poorer population groups encounter financial obstacles when seeking a fair dispute settlement, be this governmental or non-governmental. In the partner countries, vulnerable citizens on a low income have few ways of resolving conflicts of interest in a non-violent and mutually agreeable manner. The lack of infrastructure in the four partner countries also prevents direct access to the internet for citizens in poverty. As a result, digitalisation synergies which would improve access to justice are scarcely possible. However, the legal practitioners, who play a decisive role as intermediaries providing access to justice for citizens and economic stakeholders, are relatively well connected to the internet, so the potential of digitalisation in strengthening access to justice could also be leveraged for poorer population groups.

The German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has commissioned the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH with the project "Promotion of Rule of Law and Judiciary in Africa" (PRoLA), specifically for the four countries Côte D"Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania.

The project focuses to strengthen the access to justice for vulnerable citizens, particularly women, and economic stakeholders in Côte d"Ivoire, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania.

The Regional Project's methodological approach is to promote the rule of law by advocating for better access to justice in state courts and strengthening out-of-court dispute resolution mechanisms. Therefore, the regional project will work to improve legal services and take measures to strengthen state and non-state institutions in their efforts to improve access to justice.

The four implementing partners of the project are in Côte d"Ivoire the Ministry for Justice and Human Rights (Ministère de la Justice et des Droits de L"Homme de la République de la Côte d"Ivoire), for Ghana the Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Justice of Ghana, for Senegal the Ministry of Justice (Ministère de la Justice du Sénégal) and for Tanzania the Ministry of Constitutional and Legal Affairs (MoCLA).

PRoLA has four main outputs, but this tender is focusing on Output 4 only. The aim of Output 4 is to make information relating to access to justice more easily available to governmental and non-governmental legal practitioners such as attorneys, commercial lawyers, civil society organisations (CSOs) and judges. It is assumed here that better access to information for legal practitioners with regard to legal sources leads to better access to justice. It is assumed that legal practitioners have an interest in conducting legal cases within the framework of the applicable legal order.

The "PRoLA" project intends to promote organisations in the four partner countries to make legal sources in selected fields of law available to all legal practitioners in a user-friendly digital form.

There are three work packages to be performed under this contract.

- Work package 1: operations management and research on the physical location of the specified legal texts in Ghana, Côte d"Ivoire, Senegal and Tanzania;

- Work package 2: partial digitalisation and uploading of a total of 1,000,000 pages of legal texts in Ghana, Côte d"Ivoire, Senegal and Tanzania;

- Work package 3: full digitalisation and uploading of a total of 500,000 pages of legal texts in Ghana, Côte d"Ivoire, Senegal and Tanzania.