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 India; his grandfather was a Gandhian who ran a small printing press. Maru attended Harvard College from 1993–97, receiving an A.B. in Social Studies. He graduated magna cum laude, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and was Class Marshal. His thesis was entitled "Mohandas, Martin, and Malcolm on Violence, Culture and Meaning." From August 1997 to August 1998, he was a Frederick Sheldon Fellow at the Harvard University Extension School in western India, where he worked with grassroots rural-development organizations, taught classes, trained teachers, designed a curriculum, and conducted research. 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." He attended Yale Law School from 1998 to 2001, receiving a Doctor of Law (JD). According to the ABA Journal, Maru nearly quit law school "because it wasn't presenting him with a Gandhian approach" to legal work. At Yale he was co-founder and director of the Umoja Education Program and a fellow of the Schell Center for Human Rights. He was also a Founding Team Member of the Amistad Academy Charter School. Career From August 2001 to August 2002, Maru served as law clerk for Federal Appellate Judge Marsha Berzon of the Ninth Circuit of Appeals in the San Francisco Bay Area. Based in New York City, he was a Finberg Fellow at Human Rights Watch from September 2002 to September 2003. After Maru was invited by a friend, Simeon Koroma, 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