Project With International Justice Mission To Combat Land Grabbing Jinja

UCU Students pose with the IJM team

Working with International Justice Mission (IJM) is an overwhelmingly worthwhile experience and such a great opportunity. The experience has not only been an academic engagement but also inspirational hands on experience.

A group of 4 students travelled to Jinja for an IJM project to try and resolve matters involving land grabbing in that region between the months of October and November 2017.

International Justice Mission

IJM has worked in Uganda since 2004. Some of its work involves rescuing victims of property and land grabbing in partnership with local authorities. IJM finds widows and orphans that are under threat of having their property and land grabbed and brings them to safety. It also brings criminals to justice by working with local authorities to ensure criminals are restrained and prosecuted when they have committed a crime. IJM restores survivors by providing counseling, education, job training and other tools for survivors to thrive. Lastly it strengthens justice systems by identifying gaps in the system which prevents protection for the poor and then works with the police, prosecutors, courts and other stakeholders to address these complex challenges.

IJM has its country headquarters in Ntinda Kampala with 24 offices worldwide. It’s basically the largest organization of its kind. In nearly 20 communities throughout Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia it combats slavery, sex trafficking, police brutality, property grabbing and other forms of violence. By and large, land and property disputes remain a great challenge in the region and the entire country and in some cases, lead to crime.

IJM has been engaged in a survey and research in a bid to ascertain how effective the Courts of Law have disposed of the cases in regard to widows rights of property inheritance. This has been in various districts ranging from Jinja, Buikwe, and Mukono among others.  In conjunction with UCU students IJM sought to eradicate the crime of property and land grabbing. This has been effected through a survey and perusal of files in the Chief Magistrate Courts of the aforementioned Districts.

IJM combats property grabbing from widows and orphans through individual casework and targeted systems reform projects. The ultimate objective of the program is to gauge the rate of disposal of related cases and thus set a strategy to achieve reduction in the prevalence of property grabbing from widows and orphans arising from delay of court case disposal.

Aims and Objectives of the project

This project had its own fundamental aims and objectives that they wanted to achieve at least within the time they had allocated to the project and such objectives among many others include;

1. To find out the patterns in which cases on land grabbing and property inheritance by widows and orphans are disposed of by Courts of Law.
2. To find out how often widows apply for letters of administration and how often these are granted to them.
3. To find out the rate at which Property grabbing in Jinja is prevented through consistent documentation of testamentary intent and estate administration through probate and letter of administration pre-requisites.

The Activities while at the court.

We started the work at 8 AM and finished the work at 5:00 P.M considering we had many files to go through. Some of the activities we participated in include as follows;

1.   Identification of files

The students were involved in identification of the files between 2010- 2016 and a few from 2017 in respect of these areas. This involved getting to talk to the officer in charge of the registry so as to look through the files. We checked through about two hundred files trying to identify files that particularly concerned application for letters of administration, letters of probate by the widows.

(Attached are pictures during the process of identification of files in the registry)

2.   Data entry

The students also worked with the IJM team in entering data into the computers. This was done in pairs, as one individual would do the reading as the other would enter the data this made the process even faster, easier, and more accurate. This was done so as to come up with a logical conclusion as to whether cases in the aforementioned fields were being handled expeditiously or not. The students were able to enter data for about two hundred files as a team.

(Attached are pictures taken during the data process session)

3. Return of the files

 We returned the files and arranged them in their respective shelves and according to their file numbers. This was done because prior to our removing them from the shelves the students had pledged to return them after use and organize them the way we had found them.

We learnt a  lot ranging from the fact that; (1) Women remain the largest victims of unconstitutional succession cultural practices like property and land grabbing. (2) The girl child is culturally disenfranchised in regard to property inheritance. (3) The communities cherish their culture and would love to uphold it. (4) A small number of women have solely appreciated the written succession law and rights of women, thus pointing to a brighter future. (5) Among other lessons learnt to be more patient so as to be able to produce quality work. Abraham, the team leader from and the rest of the IJM team we travelled with to Jinja can attest to the patience and resilience in trying to get the work done. And (6) we also learnt that co-operation and working as a team helps accomplish a lot of work in a short time. We accomplished greater work as a team and the oneness.

Challenges faced while conducting the Project.                 

1.    Language barrier was a big problem. The main language used during the dialogues was Luganda of which some words were hard to understand.

2.    Poor time management by participants/; at a point we had to wait till the officials from IJM came to direct us to the venue of the project in Jinja.

3.    There was limited time for the data collection this caused us to wrap up so first

Our recommendations

·         Time management should be looked into by both the participants and the IJM officials because it was double sided.

·         A follow up mechanism should be adopted to check if there are any changes on matters regarding property grabbing in societies around.

·         The criteria for choosing files should be revised since most of them belonged to the same year yet there is need to survey a range of years.

·         Efforts should also be made to conduct massive community sensitization amongst widows about the possibility of applying for probate and letters of Administration. It is also important to empower widows and orphans, to seek available justice mechanisms to safeguard their land and property rights. This report commends the innovativeness of IJM for coming up with innovative tools that are research based.

This project was conducted by Asiimwe Jotham, Kitamirike Pius, Nakamya Esther Nayiga and Kyasimire Janerose who are students of law at Uganda Christian University under the supervision of Abraham from IJM