Somali Disability Empowerment Network (SODEN) has concluded a 3 days long training workshop held for its justice promoters JPs under the program of Expending Access to Justice (EAJ) funded by USAID through the pact World

Somali Disability Empowerment Network (SODEN) has concluded a 3 days long training workshop held for its justice promoters JPs under the program of Expanding Access to Justice (EAJ) funded by USAID through the pact World this fruitful training was started on 16^th June 2021 and runs up to June 19^th, 2021.

The purpose of this high-level training workshop held for 10 of our justice promoters JPs was to enhance their legal knowledge and the skills that they may need to abide by, as well as to observe how their duties have been going on and what they have achieved so far and the challenges they had experienced to tackle collectively. On the 1^st day of the training we tremendously focused on:

• An overview of what our justice promoters should do and how they do it.
• Briefing story from each of single person from the justice promoters according to their experience in the field.
• Emphasizing the key challenges that every single person has encountered and how he/she thinks to improve accordingly.

Throughout the whole day, we spent most of the time highlighting and emphasizing some critical situations that our justice promoters face regularly then the justice promoters suggested some recommendations separately.

The 2^nd day of the training was a very important day for our session as our justice promoter’s team learned a lot of things about legal aspects required JPs persons under the program of Expanding Access to Justices (EAJ) funded by USAID through pact World and our Lawyer imparted a fruitful legal slide, tips & techniques and consultations regarded their duties. As the finalization of the 2nd-day Questions and answers along with personal views towards the training were considerably shared.

Here are some of the key challenges that our justice promoter’s team has underlined on the 2^nd day.

• The mindset of the people with disabilities.
• lack of legal awareness for people with disabilities.
• Poor justice institutions and bias.

1. The mindset of the people with disabilities is one of the key challenges that our justice promoters face daily because most of the people with disabilities PWDs believes that they are not potent enough to compete with the other society or non-disabled people due to many reasons such as: how they were literally raised up in their houses by their parents who may indirectly use inappropriate words to them at a childhood era as: “You disable so you can’t do this and so… “And another reason is the communities they’re living with who deliberately discriminate and violate against people with disabilities or sometimes forced them not to attend public events because of their disability.
2. Lack of legal awareness for the people with disabilities was seen as a crucial point because people with disabilities have no idea about when it comes to justice and they may argue: “we can no longer get access to justice while non-disabled persons are suffering lack of justice and harassment” here we can see that these people have already been denied by their communities hierarchically: Family, community, institutions, and government too.

• Poor justice institutions and bias: we also critically discussed how this point is an unimaginable challenge against our duties as justice promoters in the community and we had figured out that the justice intuitions in the country are not performing well and no friendly buildings for everyone and deliberately denial against people with disabilities despite the current situation of this war-ravaged country, bias and bribe is popularly practiced and this might demotivate with the people with disabilities.

The 3^rd day or the last day we greatly focused on the Improvement of the skills of our justice promoters to provide effective legal information and referral for people with disabilities.  Also, we figured out exactly what is the role and the responsibility of our Justice Promoters to ensure our effectiveness, as well as we had figured out the different types of justice services during this day our justice promoters learned how justice institutions works and how cases are managed according to their type and where it should take cases and many other useful guides. Finally, we got the following recommendations:

• To constant such fruitful training to empower our justice promoters through knowledge, skills, and encouragement.
• To lobby and insist on the rights of the people with disabilities especially injustice institutions to ensure that everyone has the right to access justice without any constraints.
• Calling on families, community, and government to avoid using inappropriate words and any kind of discouragement against people with disabilities