About International Lawyers for Africa
ILFA's mission is to provide work experience in top International Law firms and training in International Law and key legal practice skills to scholarship candidates chosen on a competitive basis from across Africa.
International Lawyers for Africa Project ("ILFA") was launched in March 2006 to give lawyers from Africa a grounding in specialist skills for International Lawyers.
International law is at the heart of issues which directly affect African nations ranging from debt relief to human rights, fair trade and the elimination of corruption and the protection of the environment.
ILFA aims to equip developing nations with the most skilled representatives to work for them in their dialogue with the G8 group of countries and international institutions.
To achieve this, ILFA will assist in providing placements in major city and international law firms for candidates drawn from African nations. The placements will offer a curriculum for around 30 candidates annually to rotate through a combination of the most relevant parts of existing law firm training programs, such as banking, project finance, and capital markets as well as talks and lectures from international lawyers from leading universities and amongst the relevant international institutions.
Placements are offered through an in-country competitive program to find the most suitable potential candidates. Successful candidates are placed with law firms who sponsor them individually by providing them with relevant in-house experience along the lines of a compressed training contract over a period of 3 months.
Participating Law Firms
ILFA's existence and continuing success depends entirely on the participation and support of London's leading law firms. We are fortunate to have the support of several firms for our first year with twelve of those firms hosting individual candidates.
A visit to our sponsoring firms' websites shows the range and depth of their commitment to pro bono work and corporate social responsibility.
ILFA's approach is simply to invite law firms to open up their everyday practice and the highly sophisticated training programmes already allied to it so as to harness activities already occurring in the ordinary line of professional practice in a way that will automatically propogate practice skills amongst lawyers from all over the African continent. Along the way we also hope to seed friendships and connections between the candidates and the host firms which may, as time goes by, help to develop the commercial and legal congress between London as a world financial centre and the emerging markets from which our candidates are drawn.
Please click here to see the directory of participating
law firms.
