Poverty remains a persistent challenge in numerous countries, impacting significant proportions of their populations. Poverty reduction has been the goal for not only national governments, but also for international, multilateral and regional organizations. Governments and international organizations implemented a variety of poverty reduction strategies and, in some selected country contexts, they have been successful.

There has been agreement at the global level that poverty manifests itself multidimensionally, and it does not mean lack of income and wealth only. Poverty, as lack of choices and opportunities in life, is an important dimension that influences all other dimensions of poverty, such as access to health and education. Self-empowerment of an individual is necessary for them to be able to exercise choices and access opportunities.

Law has been used as a strategy for poverty eradication, but the approaches have always been top-down where people were treated as beneficiaries, giving little scope to improve their agency and choice. Moreover, the focus of these strategies was legal institutions and lawyers rather than people. Furthermore, another limitation to these strategies was that these were implemented in selected countries’ contexts only.

Legal empowerment of the poor presented a viable alternative in the 2000s when it came to the forefront for the first time. Empowerment has been a buzzword in academia and non-profit sector over the last few decades. However, legal empowerment of the poor has not received much attention. The very first Sustainable Development Goal aspires to end poverty in all its form everywhere. CLEP believes that legal empowerment of the poor holds the key to achieve this goal. In the legal self-empowerment of the poor, external actors build the capacity of poor communities to take action in the areas of access to justice and the rule of law; and property, labour and business rights. Prerequisites such as legal identity, voice, information and awareness support the process.

To initiate a discussion amongst various stakeholders on the above stated aspects and to explore and strengthen ideas for legal empowerment of the poor, CLEP, together with Jindal Global Law Review, proposes to organise a symposium at JGU during the fall semester of 2024. Presentations made in the symposium will be developed as articles for peer reviewed special issue of JGLR. Additionally, some articles will be invited from eminent persons contributing to the field of legal empowerment especially from India and the global south.