In the beginning of 2023  GI-ESCR partnered with ICJ-Africa, CEPCJ,  and EACHRights by hosting a community dialogue with the Mathare Community Task Force and members of the community living in the Mathare informal settlement.  The purpose of the workshop was to understand the challenges regarding community members’ access to quality public education, the impact of commercialisation on their right to education in Mathare’s Mabatini and Ngei wards, the ongoing efforts by the community members to address these challenges, and to take the opportunity to enhance the understanding of strategic litigation as an advocacy tool to push for better public education in the area. This was followed by a capacity building exercise on the 9th of May exercise focused solely on the process of strategic litigation , the role of all the parties involved and the challenges to expect. 

One of the out comes of the capacity building exercise was the need to collaborate in a participatory action research, that would enable the gathering of information to inform further advocacy, including potential litigation, and generate additional evidence of the negative  impacts of commercialisation of education, and strengthen the community members efforts to affect change towards free, quality, inclusive education for all. This began with a community taskforce training of 6 members  on how to collect primary qualitative data for the research through semi-structured interview questionnaires. the interviews were conducted in the course of 10 days, between the 18th to 26th of May 2023. This was then followed by Focus Group Discussions that provided more qualitative responses on the 14th, 15th of August with different sets of parents  and on the 16th of September. 

The community members were then invited on the 13th of October for an activity on the validation of the draft report that will be launched next year. This activity underscores GI’s continuous commitment in collaborating with communities to champion and explore ways for increased access to quality, inclusive education. This project aims to achieve this by promoting democratic accountability and ensuring that both public and private entities delivering public services align with the realisation of human rights. 

Read more on our work on the right to education here.