If you ask Nelson Olanipekun how he built Citizens’ Gavel, the non-profit platform that uses AI to help people navigate Nigeria’s justice system, he would start with the story of an elderly woman whose case mirrored something much closer to home. In 2017, he was working as a lawyer in a private firm, whose major clients were banks, when the case landed on his desk. The retired woman had taken an unnamed bank to court after it refused to pay out her savings, plus interest.

Nelson’s job was to defend the bank. As the case proceeded, it began to look familiar. Years earlier, Olanipekun’s father was caught in a similar ordeal in which the same procedural tactics nearly cost his family their home.

He left the law firm after a few months. He had no plan in mind, but with only the conviction to change the system he was working within, a system, he believed, wasn’t built to protect the people it claimed to serve. Day 1: An idea that didn’t hold The gap in Nigeria’s justice system is significant.

According to the World Justice Project, an international civil society organisation aiming to advance the rule of law globally, the country ranks 104th of 143 on civil justice and 90th of 143 on criminal justice, with cost, delay, effectiveness, corruption and discrimination among the biggest barriers. Within that context, Olanipekun began to think about how technology could be used to address some of these gaps. His first idea for an access-to-justice platform powered by technology was not Citizens’ Gavel.

He called it Open Judiciary, and it was designed to fight corruption within the judicial system. The idea was built on stare decisis, a legal doctrine that requires lower courts to follow established precedents, especially from superior courts. According to Olanipekun, Open Judiciary was intended to track and monitor whether judgments from lower courts aligned with a precedent from higher courts.

In 2017, he joined the accelerator programme at CivicHive, an initiative focused on startups using technology to drive civic engagement. It was during one of the pitch sessions that he was asked to refine his idea. Instead of trying to analyse the system from the outside, he began to think about how to intervene directly and connect people to lawyers to enable them to understand the justice system.

That became Citizens’ Gavel, an access-to-justice platform launched the same year. Gavel’s early activities were mainly carried out on social media. On those platforms, people would reach out to organisations to report incidents.

Olanipekun said he would pick up cases, follow up on them, and in many instances, travel to locations himself to intervene. By 2018, lawyers who saw the work based on people’s reactions on social media joined Citizens’ Gavel as volunteers. Funding at this stage was little.

The CivicHive accelerator provided a fellowship stipend that he used for rent and volunteer support, and there was still no full clarity on what Gavel would become. “I didn’t quite understand the full extent of what I was working on, the full extent of the problem,” he said. “Nothing was clear initially, but I felt that it was unique because I was using technology.” Day 500: Working the #EndSARS movement Olanipekun noted that by early 2019, Citizens’ Gavel’s activities began unfolding in waves.

Across Nigeria, there were repeated reports of police brutality, particularly involving the now-disbanded Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the police that had long been accused of extortion, unlawful arrests, and violence. Each time there was an incident of police brutality, people would go online to make a post and tag organisations to get help. In October 2020, these scattered incidents became a nationwide youth-led protest, tagged #EndSARS, demanding accountability, reform, and an end to systemic abuse.

Protesters who needed legal support, and families who were trying to get their loved ones released, were among the people Olanipekun said reached out to the organisation. According to him, the cases Citizen’s Gavel handled at that time multiplied. Citizen’s Gavel was not alone in that moment.

A loose network of organisations, including the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) Nigeria, a human rights advocacy organisation; Feminist Coalition, a women’s rights advocacy group that led emergency response, fundraising, and logistic support for protesters; and Mentally Aware NG, a mental health nonprofit that offered free therapy for illegally detained and harassed protesters, were among the organisations that assisted during that period. To respond to the influx of cases, Citizens’ Gavel had to operate like an emergency system. Olanipekun said that Gavel’s network of volunteer lawyers expanded to 250 across the country, with rapid response legal teams, who could get to police stations and engage authorities quickly, positioned in Lagos and Abuja. According to him, Gavel secured the release of detainees and worked