The equality effect is an international network of human rights advocates (including grass roots community members, artists, musicians, film makers, health care workers, journalists, lawyers, teachers, students, judges and Parliamentarians) working collaboratively to improve the lives of women and girls by using existing human rights law to achieve concrete change.

The equality effect is a non-profit charity that uses international human rights law as a crowbar to pry open justice for women and girls around the world. Drawing on a team of feisty international lawyers, the equality effect supports its regional legal partners by initiating creative legal advocacy projects to achieve systemic change, e.g.: conducting research, collecting evidence, and developing test case litigation. In Kenya, the equality effect coordinated a constitutional claim against the government for failing to protect girls who had been raped; Kenya’s High Court agreed that the police failure to enforce existing rape laws, and police failure to protect them from rape, is a violation of domestic, regional, and human rights law. The equality effect is now implementing an inter-disciplinary, cross-sector plan, working with police, schools, and local communities, to ensure the implementation of the 160 Girls decision. The work that led to this landmark ruling informs the equality effect’s newest project in Malawi that also seeks justice for victims of rape.

As three-time Amnesty International Media award-winner and author Sally Armstrong writes: “Once, in a very long while, maybe once in a lifetime, you get to witness a story that shifts the way an entire country or continent sees itself. The process of change is usually daring, certainly time-consuming, invariably costly, occasionally heart-breaking, and eventually an exercise so rewarding that it is the stuff of legends; this is the story of the equality effect.” In June 2017 the United Nations recognized the equality effect’s 160 Girls project as a best practice relating to advancing women’s rights and women’s empowerment.