Many Roads to Justice: The Law Related Work of Ford ... - UNDP

1 4 6 CA S E ST U D I E SChanges and ContributionsC o n c l u s i o nThe long-term nature of development means that the larg e re ffects of Ford-supported law work in Bangladesh will becomeclear only years from now. Nevertheless, some tentative impressionsare starting to emerge regarding grantees’ progress andimpact, and the roles Ford played.Consider the standard set by the 1994 PILI description citedearlier in this chapter: “If successful, this initiative should forg ean increasingly broad-based community of like-minded activistscommitted to changing the existing legal structures and conventions.”It would be a vast overstatement to give sole credit to Fordor its grantees for the growth of legal advocacy and legal awarenesswork in Bangladesh in recent years. Still, these grantees arepart of a growing movement that involves mainstream developmentNGOs. The Legal Awareness Forum, comprising twentyfourorganizations, includes several that only became engaged inthis work in the late 1990s. W h a t ’s more, some top law graduatesare opting for full-time or part-time work with legal servicesNGOs. Shahdeen Malik of BLAST reports that “we’re now hiringstudents from the upper 10 percent of their classes” for Dhakabasedpositions. And leading young lawyers have maintaineda ffiliations with ASK policy research projects, despite leaving thecountry to obtain advanced degrees in Britain.Of equal importance, what was a set of relatively isolatedentities five years ago has become “an increasingly broad-basedcommunity” demonstrating growing sophistication in fields rangingfrom mediation to public interest litigation to policy advocacy. A leading NGO figure, Khushi Kabir of the group Nijera Kori,feels that “what started as individual support for victims hasmoved into using cases to educate, to publicize, to pursue policychange.” BELA’s Farooque similarly observed that increasedNGO interaction has helped once isolated legal services groupsmove “from a localized vision to a national vision. For example,now they’re talking about the rights of female prisoners and proposedamendments to the jail code.” And with the law clinics