By Mpho Raboeane – May 2026
On Thursday, 23 April, our team met with the leadership of Community Advice Offices South Africa (CAOSA), including its Chairperson, Deputy Chief Justice Dunstan Mlambo, and acting co-directors Seth Mguni and Wayne Ncube. Our conversation returned, as it so often does, to familiar pressures facing the sector: chronic underfunding, the absence of formal recognition, and uneven state support. These challenges are longstanding and structural, shaping the daily reality of community advice offices and the people who sustain them.
Yet what stayed with me long after the meeting was not scarcity, but the extraordinary social and moral weight this sector continues to carry despite having so little material support. Community advice offices remain among the most important, and least recognised, forms of social infrastructure in South Africa.
Community advice offices occupy the space between what the law promises and what people are actually able to access. They are the places people turn to when trying to secure a birth certificate, challenge an unlawful dismissal, access a social grant, escape violence, or hold on to a home. In doing so, they become sites of trust, mediation, political education, and community organising.
This role is deeply rooted in South Africa’s history. From the 1960s through the 1980s, advice offices formed part of the wider architecture of resistance to apartheid. With the support of organisations such as the Black Sash, paralegals helped communities navigate pass laws, forced removals, labour exploitation, and the dense bureaucratic machinery used to control Black life. In that period, the law was not neutral; it was an instrument of domination. Advice offices made the law intelligible to those it was designed to exclude, carving out pathways through systems meant to frustrate, displace, and silence. In doing so, they built local power and collective resilience under immense pressure.
The democratic transition transformed South Africa’s constitutional framework but did not eliminate the distance between formal rights and lived realities. While the Constitution promises dignity, equality, and access to justice, these remain difficult to realise without practical support. Today, through CAOSA’s coordination, community advice offices operate in more than 250 locations across the country, from densely populated townships to remote rural villages, in some instances with a single office supporting dozens of surrounding communities.
Their significance lies not only in the issues they address, but in how they restore agency. To sit with someone, explain their options, guide them through a process, and accompany them through an often hostile system is a profoundly political act. It insists that the poor are not outside the law and affirms that dignity is not theoretical.
My own understanding of this work was shaped during my articles of clerkship, visiting communities dispossessed of their ancestral land and engaged in long struggles for justice, reparation, and return. I learned from the deeply knowledgeable Bab’Mtshali, whose understanding combined legal insight with lived history. In Orange Farm, I witnessed forms of community empowerment and economic solidarity through initiatives such as Bab’Bricks and the local advice office. Alongside Mme Josephine, I was part of providing legal advice and referral support in contexts where even small interventions could make a tangible difference.
Deputy Chief Justice Mlambo himself cut his teeth in advice offices across Soweto, where early exposure to community-based justice work helped shape a legal career grounded in access, dignity, and accountability, values that continue to inform his leadership today, including as Chairperson of CAOSA.
And yet, despite the sector’s undeniable importance, it remains structurally precarious. Advice offices operate with inconsistent funding, limited recognition, and minimal institutional protection, while being expected to absorb the consequences of deep and persistent inequality.
This contradiction reveals something fundamental about how justice is maintained in South Africa. Much of what keeps communities functioning does not happen through well-resourced institutions. It happens through under-recognised labour, carried out by people who continue to serve despite instability because they understand what is at stake.
The advice office sector quietly holds together the relationship between people and the promises of democracy. If we are serious about justice, this sector cannot remain an afterthought. Supporting paralegals is not peripheral social support; it is an investment in the everyday functioning of democracy. In a society still marked by inequality, community advice offices sustain the conditions under which democratic life becomes possible.
That is their work – every single day.
