AVOCATS SANS FRONTIÈRES IS LAUNCHING A CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR A
Consultancy for a benchmark study on tools for the management of legal aid actions
Project: Benchmark study for the implementation of a digital tool for the management of legal aid at ASF and its partners Application deadline: 1st of August 2025 Start: 14th of August 2025
1. Our organisation Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF) is an international NGO, headquartered in Brussels, whose objective is to contribute to the achievement of a just and equitable society, in which the law serves the most vulnerable groups. ASF has permanent missions in Tunisia, DRC, CAR, Uganda, Niger and Morocco. ASF aims to promote access to justice and guarantee the protection of human rights, particularly for people in vulnerable situations. ASF seeks to empower rights-holders by setting up accessible legal aid services, to enable quality care to be provided by legal aid providers, and to advocate for a legal environment that respects national and international standards. 2. Presentation of the project Legal aid represents a central pilar of ASF’s work and is integrated in the majority of its projects (which touch on such varied themes as transitional justice, preventive detention, the protection of human rights defenders, business & human rights, and the protection of the human rights of vulnerable populations). It does so through various mechanisms such as legal advice, legal clinics, and judicial or extra-judicial assistance. ASF carries out its legal aid activities in close collaboration with local actors, in particular specialised lawyers, paralegals and civil society organisations. Despite the strategic importance of these interventions, the current system for managing legal aid remains largely manual and unstructured. It is based on a three-stage process: lawyers or civil society actors fill in paper forms for each consultation, the data is then entered manually into Excel or equivalent files, then compiled by hand for monitoring, analysis or reporting purposes. This approach gives rise to a number of major difficulties: data is often incomplete or scattered, a limited usability of the information collected, it is impossible to ensure structured qualitative monitoring of legal work, and the administrative workload on the teams is heavy, to the detriment of substantive work. These constraints compromise both operational efficiency and the quality of the services provided. Faced with the limitations of the manual system, some ASF offices have tried to overcome these constraints by adopting the KoboToolbox software, an open source tool for creating customised forms for data collection. However, this solution also has significant limitations. The tool is not designed for this type of activity. It cannot be used to track a legal file over time, nor can it be updated. In addition, the widespread adoption of Kobo remains hampered by a persistent digital divide within the teams and certain local partners, as well as a reluctance to use new digital tools, limiting its scope as a cross-disciplinary solution. At present, ASF teams have two complementary needs in terms of digital tools. The study will need to determine whether it is feasible to have a single tool capable of covering these two functions or whether it will be necessary to adopt two separate tools: