Always There: Self-Service Digital Legal Aid for Displaced Populations
By Norwegian Refugee Council
The traditional approaches of delivering legal aid services to conflict-affected groups are mainly based on human resources and interaction. Hence, they are limited by time, resources available, access constraints and geography while the legal needs of the vulnerable groups vastly outstrip the supply of services. Moreover, traditional non-digital case management approaches limit beneficiary access to case accurate real-time updates on progress and do not allow capable beneficiaries to self-serve their case. Many of the current approaches to delivering content digitally are static in nature, where the information provided to beneficiaries does not dynamically adjust to a user’s personal characteristics, location and specific needs.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) will create a dynamic, self-service digital platform that provides tailored legal aid to vulnerable populations based on users’ needs, location and profile, improving the delivery of legal aid services. Digitizing the counselling dynamic and building a beneficiary facing platform will allow for multi-channel distribution of tailored legal aid advice, not bound by operational constraints and accessible to end users at any time. This will reduce the physical time, and financial boundaries that prevent the NRC from delivering legal aid to vulnerable, hard to reach populations. If successful, vulnerable, hard to reach populations will have much better access to legal advice tailored to their needs and profile. Through encouraging self-service, NRC staff will have more time to devote to those unable to self-service their needs.
