Vivek Maru

Vivek Maru is an American social entrepreneur and human rights activist who is a pioneer in the field of legal empowerment. He is currently the CEO of Namati, which he founded in 2011. Namati and its partners have supported cadres of grassroots legal advocates – sometimes known as "barefoot lawyers" or "community paralegals"– in ten countries. These advocates equip their communities to protect common lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.

In a 2014 article, Maru complained that "when world governments adopted development goals 15 years ago, law and justice were left out." As a result, while major progress has been made in the fields of health, education, and the reduction of poverty, access to law and justice has lagged behind. He asserted that all people should have the right to information about the laws and institutions they live under, the right to a legal identity, the right to have their property ownership respected, the right to participate in the shaping of laws and policies, and the right to a fair legal resolution of problems and conflicts.

Early life and education Maru's parents were immigrants from Kutch district of Gujarat, India; his grandfather was a Gandhian who ran a small printing press. He is proficient in English, Gujarati, Kutchi, Sierra Leonean Krio, and Hindi. He lived in "a hut made of sticks and dung amid the poverty and pollution of India's Kutch region, from which his grandfather came." He "worked with grassroots organizations on watershed management and education for girls." to help Sierra Leone in the wake of its civil war, they co-founded Timap for Justice, which developed a nationwide network of paralegals at a time when there were only about 100 lawyers in the entire country, almost all of them in Freetown. "Paralegals working and living in the community can squeeze a lot of justice out of the system," Maru explained. In the same year he won the Professional Achievement Award from the Kutchi Jain Association of North America. In 2012 he won the Entrepreneur Award from the Connecticut Chapter of the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin. In 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek and Sonkita Conteh, director of Namati – Sierra Leone, two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year.

Memberships He is a member of the New York Bar Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a founding board member of Timap for Justice Sierra Leone and Res Publica. He is an affiliate expert with the United Nations Commission on Legal Empowerment, a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Journal of Health and Human Rights, a member of the advisory council of the International Development Law Organization Community Land Titling Project, and a member of the board of the Ebou Fund.

Media and Publications Op-Eds and Public Writing "Why planetary survival will depend on environmental justice," Los Angeles Times (2021) "Digital IDs Make Systemic Bias Worse," WIRED (2020) "Myanmar is confiscating land that people depend on," Thomson Reuters Foundation News (2019) "The World Bank Shouldn’t Hide When It Funds Projects that Harm Communities," The Washington Post (2018) "To Stop the Relentless March on Climate Change We Must Empower Those Most at Risk," WIRED (2017) "Only the Law Can Restrain Trump," Foreign Policy (2017) "Why Norway Should Lead a Global Fund for Legal Empowerment," Aftenposten (2016) "It's Time Canada Makes Access to Justice a Reality for All," The Hill Times (2016) "Barefoot Lawyers, Communities, and the Earth: Legal Empowerment and the Struggles for Stewardship," Article 3 Advisors (2016) "Access to Justice for All? Now That Would be a Measurably Good Thing," The Guardian (2016)

Journal Articles "Give People the Law," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (2020) "What Do We Know about Legal Empowerment? Mapping the Evidence," Hague Journal on the Rule of Law (2017) "Transforming Policy into Justice: The Role of Health Advocates in Mozambique," Health and Human Rights (2016)

Books/Books Chapters/Policy Documents/Practitioner Guides Bringing Law to Life: Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2018) "Legal Empowerment and the Land Rush: Three Struggles," The International Rule of Law Movement - A Crisis in Legitimacy and the Way Forward (2014) Legal Empowerment and the Administrative State: A Map of the Landscape, and Three Emerging Insights (2013)

Personal life Maru lives in Washington, D.C. with his Indian American novelist wife Tania James. They have a son.