Legal Aid Services

Legal Aid

Provision of Legal aid services has been the flagship of TAWLA since inception. Without compromising on the quality of justice accessed to the needy woman, the Legal Aid Team emphasize the speed of delivering it. TAWLA provides legal aid services to indigent women and children in the society through their offices based in Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, Arusha, Mwanza and Tanga regions. TAWLA staff attends to clients every Monday and Wednesday from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. The team also provides legal aid through Hotline numbers which are 0800 110017/ 0800 751010 from Monday – Friday.

Legal Presentation

This ensures that no needy client is denied justice due to inability to raise court-filing fees. A litigation fund set up under this intervention goes towards support of direct legal representation and filing of cases in court.

Self Representation

This initiative empowers women to be able to claim their rights through the formal court system. This is mainly for simple cases that do not require technical legal requirements and includes child custody and maintenance cases, divorce and separation if there are no issues with a division of matrimonial property, child custody and maintenance etc.

Reconciliation as a way of resolving family disputes.

TAWLA  is a Family Mediation Centre and seeks to encourage women to take up Alternative Dispute Resolutions (ADR) as they are faster and more acceptable among disputing parties. It is a voluntary process and has been able to assist in civil cases such as succession, a division of matrimonial property, women land and inheritance and other civil cases.

Mediation has been quite successful as an ADR mechanism with more women making a preference to Mediation as opposed to other Legal Aid Interventions. This has prompted TAWLA  to train its partners in the community as mediators to preside over issues that affect women at the community level.

 Pro Bono lawyers’ scheme

The scheme consists of a large number of lawyers who have signed up to ‘give back to the community’ through volunteering their time and legal services to the women of Tanzania. They mainly take up cases filed far away from the four offices thereby bringing TAWLA services closer to the women.
It consists of practising advocates who share TAWLA’s vision and mission of enhancing access to justice for poor and needy women.