Empower Youth Fellow: Building Youth Leadership and Legal Capacity

Forum for Nation Building (FNB) Nepal is a small Nepali NGO focused on increasing access to legal empowerment and justice at the grassroots level, and National University for Study and Research in Law (NUSRL) is an Indian public law university specialising on protecting and promoting fundamental human rights. While both organisations work towards the same goal of improving access to justice, each partner brings unique but complementary strengths, technical expertise and practical experience to the partnership. Notably, FNB Nepal brings strong grassroots expertise in access to justice, labour migration and community-based legal empowerment, while NUSRL has well-documented academic, research and institutional expertise in legal education, governance and policy analysis.

Through the exchange, FNB Nepal hope to gain deeper insight into India’s provincial governance systems, and to learn about the structured legal education models and research methodologies used by NUSRL. This will strengthen FNB’s capacity in documentation, comparative legal research, and systematic impact assessment of community-based justice interventions.

At the same time, NUSRL intend to learn from FNB’s practical, grassroots experience in delivering access-to-justice services in resource-constrained settings. This includes community mobile legal clinics, migration counselling and rights-based engagement with marginalised communities. NUSRL will gain practical understanding of how legal empowerment strategies are operationalised outside formal court systems, particularly in contexts of open-border migration and local governance innovation. They anticipate that these insights will enrich their legal education, community outreach models, and socio-legal research approaches.

The project contributes primarily to SDG 16, Peace, justice and strong institutions. Through its focus on increasing knowledge of legal frameworks and tools at the grassroots level, it also contributes to SDG 4, Quality education. The project will also work to protect the rights of migrant workers, and thus also contributes to SDG 8, Decent work and economic growth. The project's DAC code is 151, ‘Government and Civil Society - General’, with DAC subsector 15130, ‘Legal and judicial development’.

Expected project results focus on:

(i) Strengthening their participants’ knowledge and professional competencies related to access to justice, labour migration, alternative dispute resolution and justice mechanisms, as well as through the development of a legal empowerment network.

(ii) Strengthening organizational capacity and reach through joint research and publications on community-based justice mechanisms, including judicial and mom-judicial dispute resolution.

(iii) Improving community access to basic legal education as well as to functional judicial mechanisms and structures.