The Segal Family Foundation has recognised the Gender and Justice Unit with its 2026 Fighting for Fairness Award, presented in honour of the Foundation’s late founder, Barry Segal. They also made a film about our work. Watch it below.
The Fighting for Fairness Award goes to an organisation that uses its platform to give voice and power to historically marginalised groups. Barry Segal built his philanthropy on a conviction that was unusual then and remains unusual now: that local leaders should hold the money and the relationships needed to change their own communities. He backed people other funders overlooked. Receiving an award that carries his name matters to us for that reason above any other.
Why this work exists
In Malawi, a woman seeking justice tends to meet the same wall wearing a different face each time. The court is a day’s travel away. A lawyer costs more than she earns in a month. No one has explained her rights in a language she speaks or reads. And when she does come forward, she meets stigma, or a system that struggles to recognise what happened to her as a wrong at all. GJU exists to close that distance. Our position is narrow, and we hold it firmly: access to justice should not depend on where a woman lives, what she earns, or whether the people in authority are willing to believe her.
How we work
We combine legal empowerment, strategic litigation, community justice networks, mobile courts, research, advocacy and legal technology. Two examples of what that looks like in practice.
EmpowerLine Malawi. Anyone can dial 4285, free of charge, and hear legal information explained in English, Chichewa, Chitumbuka or Chiyao. No smartphone. No data. No long document to read. A companion app covers domestic violence, family law, property rights, children’s rights and violence in the workplace. Survivors, paralegals and community liaisons designed it alongside us, which is why it answers the barriers people actually face rather than the ones we assumed. Since the line opened in April 2025, close to half the callers have been men, many of them trying to understand maintenance, inheritance and their own legal obligations. We did not predict that. It has changed how we think about reach.
48 to Infinity. When we counted the Malawian women with a Wikipedia entry, we found 48. GJU now researches and documents notable Malawian women so their work can be found, cited and remembered. A woman who cannot be found in the record cannot be found by the systems now learning from it.
None of this works without partnership. Community liaisons and paralegals carry the work into places we could never reach alone. Justice-sector actors, civil society organisations and funders keep it standing. And the women who bring us their cases take the largest risk of anyone involved.
This award belongs to a community
To our board and staff, our paralegals and community liaisons, our partners and funders, and above all to the women and communities who trusted us with their stories: this is yours.
What comes next
Demand for accessible justice is growing faster than the supply of it. We are strengthening community justice systems, extending EmpowerLine’s reach and investing in approaches that meet women where they already are, because lasting change gets built with communities rather than delivered to them. If you fund this kind of work, or want to, there are three things you can do today.
- Watch the film and share it. Reach is the cheapest thing you can give us.
- Partner with us. Write to info@genderandjustice.org and tell us what you are trying to change. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it.
- Fund the work. Unrestricted support is what let us build EmpowerLine before anyone could see the results.
The women in these communities are not waiting quietly for change. They are already building it. The film shows how far that has carried us, and how much further it can go.