Applications Are Open for the HiiL Innovating Justice Challenge 2020

Applications are now open for the 2020 edition of the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL) Innovating Justice Challenge.

Based in The Hague, HiiL is a social enterprise devoted to user- friendly justice. That means justice that is easy to access, easy to understand, affordable, and effective. HiiL has a vision to ensure that by 2030, 150 million people will be able to prevent or resolve their most pressing justice problems.

Is your organisation developing sustainable, scalable solutions to pressing justice needs? Are you creating access to justice, reducing inequality and unfairness? Then you should apply for the HiiL Innovating Justice Challenge 2020 for a chance to be selected for support through the prestigious HiiL Justice Accelerator.

The challenge is for promising innovations that are already showing measurable impact, have the potential to become financially sustainable, and have the plans and ambition to scale across different markets. These enterprises are led by a strong team with experienced and inspiring founders.

“From what we’ve seen over the years, justice innovations come from all sectors of society as they underpin the Sustainable Development Goals with an aim to reduce all forms of inequality,” says Odunoluwa Longe, HiiL’s Justice Accelerator Head for West Africa who is also a justice innovator herself having co-founded DIYlaw, a past Innovating Justice Challenge winner. “Some reduce the cost of legal services, some reduce financial inequalities, some reduce disputes by visualizing legal information and contracts and others are designed to support informal mechanisms of conflict resolution in communities.”

Innovating Justice Challenge

The Innovating Justice Challenge scouts and selects the most promising justice innovations for the Justice Accelerator programme. Applications for the challenge will be open between 10 June and 5 August, via www.hiil.org/innovating-justice-challenge.

The Justice Accelerator HiiL’s Justice Accelerator offers a four-month programme that provides 10,000 EUR non-equity, non-debt, funding, business development support (which includes training, coaching and mentorship), access to a global network, international exposure, and connections for further investment opportunities for startups.

HiiL’s Justice Accelerator is the world’s only accelerator that focuses on preventing and resolving justice problems. The accelerator looks for startups that can grow and scale to impact thousands and potentially millions of people. HiiL has supported more than 110 justice innovations worldwide since 2011. Some of those have impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and scaling to a regional level with the potential to become global players.

Examples of startups that HiiL has supported in West Africa in the past include a mobile app operated by agents to help people without smartphones and internet save without falling victim to fraud, a bot-powered mobile app that provides answers to legal questions for SMEs in Francophone West Africa, a website that helps prevent digital fraud through identity verification and protection and intrapreneurs within a state ministry of justice that are using community-focused ADR to bring peace to conflict-ridden communities.

To submit an application, entrepreneurs should click here