TERMS OF REFERENCE FOR A PREPARATION OF COMPUTERIZED DATA BASE OF THE CASES HANDLED BY ADDIS ABABA AND REGIONAL BRANCHES LEGAL AID OFFICE OF ETHIOPIAN WOMEN LAWYERS ASSOCIATION
The Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association is a non-governmental, non-partisan non-profitable organization established in 1995 for the promotion and advancement of women’s rights in the country. It strives towards the creation of GBV/HTPs free environment to achieve gender equality.
EWLA in partnership with UNFPA is implementing a project entitled ‘Enhance SGBV/HTPs prevention and access to Justice to women and Girls via multifaceted approach; in Addis Ababa, Amhara, Oromiya, SNNPR, Gambella and Benshangul Gumuz in collaboration with different stakeholders. The overall objective of the project is to enhance Gender Equality and Mitigating SGBV through the provision of legal aid, Capacity Building and Public Education and research and advocacy.
Why we need to have a computerized data base.
Every year the legal aid office handles large number of cases on variety of issues. From time to time researchers request us to give them information about these cases. Furthermore, we believe that the legal aid program can be exploited to study trends of problems faced by women so that the result can be used to reinforce EWLA’s advocacy and lobbying activities. Thus the availability and accessibility of organized and systematic information of our cases is vital. In addition, the data base will also help to improve our service by enabling us to easily identify inadequacies and delays in our services as well as in the response of the relevant bodies or individuals. Also we will be able to track dormant files i.e. cases where clients have failed to report back the results or where they have given up the pursuit of their case. Thus we can contact clients either to find out results or to offer further support.
The data base could only be managed through a computerized system.
Excepted Results
1.The systematic information which we will be able to access from the data bank will be used to prepare statistical and textual reports. Thus we expect that we can categorize cases on different characteristics which include the following:
Case type& and case subtype- This will help us to identify the common problems women are faced with.
Type of service rendered by EWLA – This is a direct indicator of the activities and actions of the legal aid office.
Case status- Through this we will be able to identify if we need to take further action.
End results of the cases – It is essential to know what changes we have made.
Case duration- delays within our office as well as other authorities such as the law enforcement institutions can be identified by looking at the case duration.
Personal status of applicants and respondents- this might be used to study the relevance of status( marital status, dependency relationship, socio economic class, employment, educational level) to violations of rights.
Any case can be retrieved any time by Age, sex, case type etc.
Produce report based on the data, for internal and external bodies
Some particular explanations about the case may be included in a remark field.
2.The data entry person and those who need to access the information are not the same persons. Therefore we need to have a network between branch computers which are found in different location.
Explanatory Notes
*A more detailed chart; tables, or other which show the information we usually need to extract from the files and a form which we use to record personal status of applicants and respondents are attached to this terms of reference .
1. One case is represented in a file. It has a file number. In this file there could be the following types of combinations of applicants and respondents.
Commonly in one file there is 1 applicant and 1 respondent. But in rare cases the following may be exhibited in a file:
1applicant – more than one respondent (e.g. one victim by several rapists)
More than one applicant - one respondent (e.g. several victims by one rapist)
More than one applicant – More than one respondent (e.g. several victims by several victims)
2. One and the same person (applicant) may have more than one file in which different cases are being handled.
3. One case may fall under more than one case type or case subtype. For instance in a marital dispute the problems of the applicant wife could be battery, adultery and lack of maintenance at the same time.
4. Files are identified by their file number
Time Frame
The programming must be finalized within two months.
Responsibilities
1.The computer programming will be accomplished by hired consultants whose responsibility will include the following:
2.The task of entering the data (the cases or files) is to be accomplished by the employees of EWLA.
3.Payment will be effected by EWLA to the consultant upon phase by phase delivery of the work by the latter. EWLA may require the consultant to furnish a guarantee until the system has continually worked for some time.