– by Valerie Wilson, L ’25

In the Access to Justice Clinic, our team of Kiko Galpin, Jackie Jaques, Lara Ormiston and Valerie Wilson worked this spring with Haki na Sheria, a Kenyan NGO “dedicated to ending the discrimination and promoting the rights of marginalized communities in Northern Kenya.”  Our task was to produce a report about the impact of Kenya’s “Maisha Namba” digital ID program on Kenyan Somalis and other groups that struggle with access to identity documents because of discrimination and marginalization in Kenyan society. (The clinic was co-taught this semester by Laura Bingham of the Institute for Law, Innovation and Technology (iLIT) and Len Rieser of the Sheller Center.)

Haki na Sheria has done extensive community education and legal empowerment work with the Kenyan Somali community in Garissa County, a rural area in Kenya’s northeast. Haki na Sheria advocates to promote the right to a nationality and to prevent statelessness, and provides accompaniment for members of the Kenyan Somali community who are applying for national identity cards, which provide proof of nationality and are issued to Kenyans from age 18.

 In Kenya, these national identity cards are required to work, pay school fees, and attend university. But obtaining an identity card is difficult for the people Haki na Sheria works with because of a complex practice called “vetting,” in which members of specific communities must undergo extensive security checks and heightened scrutiny to confirm their citizenship (which should be established from birth) and acquire the all-important national ID card.

After years of efforts by Haki na Sheria and other civil society groups to eliminate vetting, the practice still exists, and the Kenyan government’s decision to adopt a digital ID system has created even more uncertainty for this community and poses serious risks to their future financial, social and political inclusion. In 2020 and 2021, Haki na Sheria, along with other civil society organizations, successfully challenged a previous effort to implement digital ID (“Huduma Namba”) in the Kenyan courts, on the grounds that the project lacked an adequate legal framework to address privacy and discrimination risks. However, when the current government came into power in 2023, it announced another digital ID program under a different name — Maisha Namba — without engaging in the necessary legal and policy reforms to protect the rights of the Kenyan Somalis, other vulnerable communities, and the public in general.

When we started this project, a legal challenge to the Maisha Namba system had temporarily stalled the project through an injunction, and we therefore approached problems with the system from a theoretical standpoint. But in February 2024, the Kenyan High Court lifted the injunction on Maisha Namba’s implementation and the system began to move forward with the issuance of new cards. Our focus shifted to include current logistical and administrative problems with the actual implementation of the system on the ground. We decided to structure our report around the UNDP Digital ID Model Governance Framework, which assesses digital ID systems based on multiple dimensions of human rights.

We conducted a literature review and interviewed community members, paralegals, and government officials who have dealt with the current ID systems and application processes in Garissa County. In the end, we were able to produce a comprehensive account of the human rights risks of digital ID tailored to the specific experiences and circumstances of the Kenyan Somali community and similarly situated groups that are forced to undergo discriminatory vetting to access identity documents proving they are Kenyan.

Our report will be the first that we know of to apply the UNDP Model Governance Framework in practice, and to provide an in-depth discussion of the impact that the Maisha Namba system will have on the Kenyan Somali community. We are eager to see how this project develops in the Advanced Access to Justice Clinic in the Fall 2024 semester. We also hope that our report spurs more researchers to study the effects of digital identity systems and other forms of digital public infrastructure on marginalized groups.

Judgments routinely favoring debt-buying companies, typically against low-income folks who may not have received proper service, understood their rights, or managed to present their defenses: that has been, at least in considerable part, the story of debt-collection court in Philadelphia. Sheller Center students have been working on the problem for several years, in partnership with Community Legal Services, the National Center for State Courts, other advocates, and the courts themselves. We’ve produced a series of reports (links below), and have done some direct representation in order to see, up close, how the process works.

Last month, we had a trial in Common Pleas Court in a credit-card-debt case that we had lost twice — first in Municipal Court, then in arbitration proceedings. Students Cathy Ginder and Nicole Kerr had worked on this case, in which — as often occurs — the debt-buyer relied on hearsay documents and offered no proof of most of the charges that our client had supposedly incurred. Those deficiencies were ignored at the earlier hearings, but on our third try, the Court saw a problem — and entered a judgment that largely favored our client.

Progress has come slowly, but we think we may finally be getting somewhere – most recently as an invited member of a new committee, convened by Municipal Court and including representatives of plaintiffs as well as defendants, charged with recommending changes. We’re looking forward to advocating for a fairer system.

Our reports:

Six Practical Ways Courts Can Reduce Default Judgments in Debt Collection Cases

Toward a More Level Playing Field: A Navigator Program for Philadelphia’s Debt-Collection Court

Preventing Unfair Default Judgments in Debt Collection Cases: Proposals for a Compliance Checklist

Enhancing Due Process in Consumer Debt Proceedings

When people want legal information but do not have access to a lawyer, they tend to head for the internet. Sometimes, they find what they’re looking for. But often, they end up overwhelmed: a search for “special education Pennsylvania,” for example, turns up 345 million sites, each of which, when visited, leads to more clicks and links.

The fact that there is so much information online, much of it disorganized and only some of it likely to be relevant to any particular visitor’s concerns, creates a huge challenge for legal aid organizations. Their web and social media sites must be readily findable by the people they seek to serve, and and must stand out from commercial and other sites that may be designed for different purposes. Navigation must be simple and straightforward. Content must be accurate, but also conveyed in terms understandable to people without legal training — often a difficult balance to achieve. Further, people seeking legal information are often in stressful situations, which complicates communication; and many speak languages other than English.

This semester, a team from the Sheller Center’s Access to Justice Clinic took an in-depth look at the web site of the Education Law Center-PA and produced a report on ways in which its already well-developed site could better serve families. Recommendations included reorganizing the site to enable parents to jump more quickly to the information they need; simplifying menus and lists; adding natural-language search and translation functions; developing more short, “plain language” resource materials; and more.

Here’s how the team, which consisted of Ingrid Xiomara Lopez Martinez, Austin Kurtanich, and Lydia Anderson, all 2Ls, summarized their work:

The Education Law Center (ELC) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving access to quality public education for all children in Pennsylvania, particularly those who are underserved. ELC provides a wide range of resources and services to various stakeholders, including families, school officials, policymakers, and community organizations. The purpose of our project was to analyze the ELC website, including its strengths and weaknesses, as well as to provide suggestions for improvement.

Our report focused on making recommendations to ELC’s overall website organization, design, and structure, including specific priority areas, such as Special Education, Bullying and Harassment, and Exclusionary Discipline. Through meetings with an ELC attorney, we learned that these priority areas were ELC’s most sought-after materials. While most parents use ELC’s Hotline number to inquire about issues, it is important that ELC’s website provides parents and other users with accessible information needed to assist in advocating for students and promoting equal opportunities to learn.

This project is a second installment in the Clinic’s work on making legal web sites more accessible to the public. Last year, a team developed a set of recommendations to enhance the web site of Philadelphia’s Common Pleas and Municipal Courts. While the context was different, the basic thrust of both efforts was the same: online legal materials are most useful to the public when they are easy to find, directly responsive to users’ actual needs, and presented in simple, easily understandable formats and language.