Dignity Kwanza

Regions: Tanzania
Website: http://www.dignitykwanza.org/

DIGNITY Kwanza – Community Solutions (Dignity Kwanza) is a national non-for-profit organization registered in Tanzania to safeguard and promote human dignity of marginalized and vulnerable population for attainment of social and economic development through education, support and empowerment. Dignity kwanza’s formation was prompted by the need to fill in the gap that would be left by her predecessor Asylum Access, Tanzania that was closing her operations in Tanzania. In realizing her mission Dignity Kwanza uses four tools namely, legal assistance (legal counselling, education and representation), community empowerment and support, targeted development programs and, advocacy, capacity building and awareness building. The population that Dignity Kwanza works with include refugees, asylum seekers and vulnerable migrants, stateless persons, people living in extreme poverty, children at risk, unemployed youth, victims of gender based violence, victims of human trafficking and victims of torture.

Dignity Kwanza is interested on issues of citizenship rights not only because stateless persons form one of her target groups, but also because marginalized and vulnerable individuals (especially refugees, children at risk and victims of human trafficking) are likely to fall in the stateless category for different reasons including missing birth registrations and/or failure to obtain legal documentation stating their nationality. Before the transition from Asylum Access, Tanzania to Dignity Kwanza, Asylum Access represented and won a case on citizenship against the Tanzania Government before the African Court of Human and People’s Rights. As such, one of Dignity Kwanza’s goals is to do advocacy around ratification, by the Tanzanian Government, of the two Statelessness Conventions, adoption of the Protocol to the African Charter on the right to a nationality and amendment of the citizenship and immigration laws to remove the provisions that can potentially create statelessness.