Twenty Years of A4ID

A4ID’s CEO Yasmin Batliwala MBE reflects on twenty years of purpose, partnership and the power of law

A4ID exists because, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a group of lawyers from both sides of the Atlantic, looked at the scale of what had happened and could not accept that the only thing they had to offer was a donation. They had a profession full of skill, access and influence, yet much of it was sitting unused in the face of a disaster of that scale.

On 16 August 2006, that discomfort became Advocates for International Development – A4ID, an answer to a very specific question: What if the legal profession put its power more deliberately in the service of justice?

Twenty years later, I have spent more than sixteen of them leading this organisation, and I still find that question open. Not because we have not answered parts of it. We have, but because the work of justice is never finished. There is always another institution that needs strengthening, another community that needs a seat at a table from which it has been excluded, another young lawyer working out what their career is actually for.

So, this anniversary is not a finish line for me. It is a foundation I am standing on, looking at what is still ahead.

It began with a belief

A4ID was built on the conviction that the legal profession held something extraordinary and mostly untapped: not just knowledge, but relationships, influence and credibility. These could be turned towards some of the world’s hardest problems if someone built the bridge to do it.

There was a second belief behind the first: that people working for justice and development should not have to navigate the legal world alone, and that lawyers should not have to choose between doing well and doing good. A young lawyer should be able to see purpose not as something bolted onto a career, but as part of what the career is.

That is still what we are building towards. It has not changed, even as almost everything around it has.

Twenty years, and not enough of them

I did not know, when I took this on, where it would lead, the people I would meet, the setbacks that would test my patience with the pace of change, or the wins that would arrive quietly, without anyone outside the room ever knowing they happened.

What sixteen years have taught me is that this work resists the tidy arc of an anniversary speech. Progress in access to justice is rarely a straight line. Institutions fail. Good intentions, on their own, are never enough. I have watched partnerships stall, funding dry up mid-programme, communities lose faith in processes that moved too slowly to matter to them. None of that diminishes what has been achieved over twenty years. It is part of the reality of trying to create lasting change.

We have not arrived anywhere final. We have built something worth building on.

The real story is people, not numbers

Anniversaries pull organisations towards numbers: countries, partners, lawyers mobilised, hours given pro bono. Those numbers exist, and they matter as evidence of scale. But they have never been the reason I do this work, and they are not the story I want to tell here.

The story is smaller than that, and more specific. It is a community organisation that finally had a lawyer in the room who was on its side. It is a lawyer who came to us expecting a CV line and left with a different sense of what their skills were for. It is a development leader who had been offered plenty of “advice” over the years and, for once, found someone willing to listen before reaching for the legal answer. These moments do not make headlines. I do not think they are supposed to. But they are the measure of this work I have come to trust most, because impact is often not one dramatic event.

It is a chain of moments, connected by people who refuse to accept that things must remain as they are.

Partnership is not a transaction

If there is one thing sixteen years has hammered into me, it is that nobody does this alone, and pretending otherwise is how organisations start believing their own press.

Climate justice, human rights, access to justice, accountable institutions, these are not separate problems that happen to overlap. They are deeply connected problems, too often approached from separate rooms.

A4ID’s job has often been to stand in the doorway between those rooms and make the introduction: the legal profession and civil society, expertise and need, established institutions and the people trying to gain access to them. The partnerships that last are the ones built on trust and a willingness to be told we are wrong, and a recognition that the people closest to a problem are usually closer to the solution than we are.

The law is powerful. But it is only ever as powerful as the people willing to put it to use, and the people willing to be honest about where it falls short.

What lawyers actually have to offer

I have spent most of my working life around lawyers, and I no longer think their most valuable asset is legal knowledge alone. It is what happens when that knowledge is joined to purpose: the ability to analyse complexity, navigate systems, challenge assumptions and hold institutions to account in the service of something that matters. That capacity works in a courtroom. It can be just as powerful in a community. A4ID has never been about providing pro bono hours. The question behind it has always been bigger: What happens if the legal profession fully understands the difference it is capable of making?

I do not think we are close to a full answer yet, and perhaps that is a good thing, because an unanswered question can keep an organisation curious.

A different world, the same purpose

2026 does not look like 2006. Technology has reshaped how this work gets done. Climate change stopped being a forecast and became a fact people are living through. Conflict, displacement and inequality are testing institutions that were already fragile, and I no longer take it for granted that people trust the systems meant to protect them. And don’t even get me started on what’s happening to the rule of law.

The implications are profound.

When technology changes faster than law, who protects rights?

When institutions weaken, who safeguards accountability?

When climate change creates new forms of vulnerability, who ensures that justice keeps pace?

When inequality determines who can access power, knowledge and representation, what does meaningful equality actually require?

These are not questions for lawyers alone, but lawyers have an essential role in answering them.

I also see reasons for optimism. I watch civil society leaders build extraordinary things from the ground up, often with very little. I watch young people refuse to accept that the world has to stay as it is. I know the importance for lawyers to ask harder, more uncomfortable questions about what their profession is actually for.

None of that was guaranteed twenty years ago either. The future is not fixed. It is made, often unevenly, by people who keep showing up.

So, the question is not simply what we preserve from the first twenty years, it is what the world actually needs from us now and that may not be the same thing.

The next twenty years

I do not want our next chapter defined by growth for its own sake. Scale is not the same as significance, and I have watched enough organisations confuse the two.

What I want instead is harder to put on a page:

To be more useful in the places where it is hardest to be useful.

To back the next generation of lawyers and justice leaders before they are already established.

To strengthen organisations that are already doing the work rather than trying to replace them.

To build partnerships that genuinely shift power rather than simply exchange resources.

And to use new tools and technologies without losing the parts of this work that have to stay human.

Staying faithful to a mission does not mean doing things the same way. Sometimes it means having the nerve to change how you pursue it.

A legacy is not what you leave behind

I have turned the word legacy over a lot this year. I used to think of it principally as something left behind. I think of it differently now: A legacy is what keeps moving because you were there to start it.

It is the person who becomes a leader because someone backed them early. The organisation that is stronger because someone stood next to it when that support mattered. The lawyer who took a different path because they found something in this work they were not expecting to find. The partnership that keeps going after everyone who started it has moved on.

A legacy is not what you leave behind. It is what you set moving before you go.

Gratitude, briefly and sincerely

There are a lot of people I owe this anniversary to. The people who founded A4ID and had the nerve to start it. Our trustees. Our development partners and the communities they serve. The thousands of lawyers who have given their time. Our amazing law firms. Our insightful funders. And, mostly, the people who have made up the A4ID team, past and present.

It is fashionable to describe organisations by their strategy documents. In my experience, they are made of the people willing to keep showing up when the strategy document does not quite cover what is in front of them.

That is what is given this organisation its character, and I am more grateful for it than a paragraph can really say.

What we choose to change

Twenty years ago, a handful of people decided to act on an idea instead of simply having it. I have spent sixteen years finding out how much further that idea can go, and I am nowhere near done finding out.

I believe every community should have the knowledge and standing to defend its own rights. I believe most lawyers, given the opportunity, want their skills to matter beyond a fee note. And I believe A4ID can keep helping to make that real, imperfectly, unevenly and with the humility to keep learning, as almost everything worthwhile is made.

The next twenty years are ours to shape. The question was never really whether we can change the world.

It is what we choose to change.

Twenty years ago, we acted on an idea. Twenty years later, we know that change is possible. Now we must decide what more is possible and, have the courage to pursue it.

Twenty years of purpose, partnership and putting law to work for a better world. The next chapter starts now.

Happy 20th anniversary, A4ID.