The Human Rights Friendly Community Program assists local multi-sectoral groups in finding complex solutions for systemic legal issues of the community: 1) to identify the problem, 2) analyze its causes, 3) select an alternative for its solution, 4) develop local strategies, and 5) implement them to make a systemic change for enhancing access to justice at the local level

The Program has been implemented since 2019. Program covered 17 municipalities from 12 of 24 Ukrainian oblasts (regions). These municipalities have a total population of more than one million people.

Sociological surveys were conducted in the communities to identify legal issues and needs of locals.

These studies allow us to understand how legal problems arise, how people perceive them, and how these proplems affect individuals and society.

Based on legal needs surveys, local roadmaps of improving access to justice are being created.

One of the instruments to secure the sustainability of the Program’s results is local access to justice programs. These programs allow raising funding from local budgets and social investors to implement activities to remove obstacles to solving people's legal problems.

Only the government network of free legal aid centers operates systematically in Ukraine. According to the report of this agency for 2020, its capacity is up to one million people a year. But this is only a tenth of the real need.

Over time, the number of people in need of legal aid will increase, and free legal aid centers will not be able to cope even with the flow of clients who physically come to their offices.

Improving access to justice does not mean simply increasing the number of courts, judges, prosecutors, police officers and lawyers. Ensuring effective access to justice is possible only through the following changes:

The guide includes experience from more than 50 legal needs studies over the past 25 years in more than 30 countries and three years of practical implementation of the Human Rights Friendly Community Program. The guide's content provides a general understanding of the impact of access to justice on people’s well-being.

This resource is a step-by-step guide on assembling a research team, planning research, choosing the best method of data collection, analyzing it, and, perhaps most importantly, applying the results to solve the identified problems.

Ukraine's first guide for community legal needs researchers provides an understanding of how to get a real picture of access to justice at the local level in a methodologically correct and low-cost way.

In recent years, the approach to research strategies in society has undergone significant changes in understanding the concept of ‘expertise’: who should be an expert what values underlie research.

Previously, the research process involved the presence of external experts - researchers. Now the paradigm is changing. Stakeholders become co-researchers and participate in the decision-making process during the research - from the formation of the research question to the interpretation of the results. The Human Rights Friendly Community Program is based on this participatory approach.

This approach creates space for a collaborative research process, where researchers are community initiative groups. They become agents of informed change rather than trying to adapt community needs to existing, externally implemented services.