20 Nov 2018

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has donated a mobile office to Legal Aid Botswana to be used in the Okavango and Ngamiland districts, where access  is limited due to lack of such resources.

The mobile office, which has an attorney’s desk and chair, air-conditioner, a computer and a printer, is expected to help attorneys deliver their services to clients residing in the remote areas who could not afford to travel to areas where Legal Aid offices are located.

Speaking during the handover ceremony recently, acting manager for Maun Legal Aid, Ms Tebogo Sethibe said that the Legal Aid Act stipulates that they should help people living within a 100 kilometre radius from their offices, and that means covering more than two villages in one day every day.

Further, she said that the areas were not easily accessible because most roads were not tarred and required certain types of vehicles.

She said the mobile office would help alleviate Legal Aid of such challenges and would help in these situations.

Ms Sethibe also highlighted a few challenges that attorneys face in Maun such as cultural shock, language barrier as some neither speak Setswana nor English and the wildlife-community conflict in the district, particularly the elephants, which normally roam the villages.

She has however noted that the Legal Aid offices in Maun had since adopted innovative approaches in order to allow them to provide their services.

Maun Legal Aid provides its staff with cellphones and airtime to allow them to get in touch with their clients.

“In our efforts of trying to bring our services to the people, we set up satellite offices in villages for a couple of days. Our satellite offices are normally spotted under a shade of trees, or at local clinics and primary schools.
Although the satellite office establishes our footprints in these villages, the only shortcoming is that they are limited as we are not equipped with enough resources to do the paperwork,” she said.

For her part, UNDP resident representative, Ms Jacinta Barrins said that the mobile office would ease their work and make them reach people wherever they were.

She expressed hope that  the vehicle would not only be restricted to the Ngamiland District, but also be used to travel to other areas.

Meanwhile, Legal Aid also launched a Mobile Application and Mobisite to help ‘improve access to justice’.

The solution offers clients or users with two platforms being the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) and Mobile App.

The USSD, available through dialing *128# offers users an opportunity to send enquiries to Legal Aid Botswana contact centre while the App provides a platform to facilitate initial communication between Legal Aid and the user at any time of the day. ENDS