Access to legal representation is essential to the realization of human rights and recognized by international law as a fundamental right itself. It determines whether people can challenge unlawful detention, contest discriminatory laws, assert constitutional protections, seek remedies for violations, and receive a fair trial, especially in criminal proceedings. Legal aid systems exist to provide representation for those who cannot afford to pay a lawyer to enforce their rights.
However, state-funded legal aid systems across much of Africa are under-resourced. Pro bono legal work, in its many forms, attempts to bridge the gap between these limited legal aid systems and demand.
The cultural economics of pro bono work
In many parts of Africa, legal professionals take on pro bono work as part of a broader sense of social responsibility to assist where one can. It is a practice rooted in a communal ethic that emphasizes collective responsibility and mutual aid. Lawyers assist with bail applications and represent defendants in criminal cases or help individuals and small organizations navigate legal systems that are often difficult to access without counsel. Sometimes they do this work formally. But it mostly takes place informally through personal networks of friends, family, and community. Despite the importance of pro bono work in determining who can access representation or challenge civil and criminal justice systems, the economic conditions of its provision are rarely examined.
Models developed in high-income countries shape much of the dominant thinking around pro bono work. However, legal markets there operate under very different conditions from those found in much of Africa. The models assume relatively high lawyer salaries, significant corporate margins, and the ability of large firms to subsidize unpaid work through their broader practice. In high-income countries, firms structure and measure pro bono work as both a professional responsibility and a way to balance commercial and transactional corporate cases with those that are more socially meaningful. This can serve as an important incentive for lawyers and can even influence the firms they join. However, the underlying assumptions of these models do not hold in African legal markets, where most lawyers work in small firms or as sole practitioners with thinner margins and less predictable incomes. Pro bono work in this context comes with real opportunity costs that must be balanced against implications for professional identity or personal fulfillment of those involved.
This matters because local legal markets often cannot sustain dominant expectations around pro bono work. And yet, norms developed in high-income countries continue to shape who can participate and what counts as a “real” pro bono case—often defined as work that is formal, visible, and easy to measure. This mismatch helps explain the tensions that emerge in the African context.
The missing middle
Pro bono work conventionally appears as charity provided to those most in need. This mirrors legal aid frameworks designed to serve people who cannot afford legal representation at all. Over time, this mirroring has narrowed the focus of pro bono work to the indigent, occluding the broader public interest. While prioritizing the most marginalized remains important, this has consequences for the understanding of legal need and deservingness in pro bono practice.
One consequence manifests in the so-called “missing middle”: people of modest means who earn too much to qualify for legal aid and too little to afford market-rate legal services. Because they do not suffer from obvious deprivation, they frequently fall outside the remit of pro bono support as well. In practice, access to representation depends, in no small part, on whether a person is perceived as sufficiently poor to warrant assistance.
A similar dynamic emerges with civil society organizations (CSOs), which can often benefit from pro bono legal support for their work in the public interest, including the defense of civic space, refugee protection, or constitutional rights. CSOs, particularly those receiving grant funding, may not fit the conventional picture of vulnerability. This makes requests for unpaid legal assistance more difficult to justify, particularly when the lawyers involved operate within financially constrained legal markets. Consequently, whether these organizations receive pro bono support may depend less on the public value of their work than on whether they fit dominant assumptions about who ought to benefit from pro bono aid.
The reach of pro bono work has practical limits
These tensions point to a broader structural issue that has direct implications for access to justice. Pro bono practice depends on the voluntary provision of legal services, but broader economic conditions shape lawyers’ capacity to provide sustained unpaid work. In resource-constrained legal markets, lawyers may assist in more limited, informal, or reduced-fee ways that fall outside conventional definitions of pro bono work. This reflects the reality that reliance on purely voluntary, unpaid representation leaves significant gaps in access to justice, especially for complex or long-term human rights matters.
The amount and type of unpaid representation that can realistically be provided in contexts where legal aid is limited and market-rate services remain out of reach inevitably vary. Debates about access to justice cannot treat pro bono practice as a uniform or infinitely elastic resource or assume that professional obligation alone can sustain the long-term provision of unpaid legal services.
Pro bono work is part of a broader legal economy, and its effectiveness depends on the material conditions under which legal work is performed. Understanding that constraint is necessary to protect the place of pro bono practice as part of a system for enforcing rights.