Amsterdam Law School
11 February 2020
Nathalie Dijkman is a programme manager at the Amsterdam Law Hub but also runs her own start-up in Uganda. SEMA is a social enterprise that enables citizens in East Africa to evaluate public services, such as the police. Because of the high level of corruption in these institutions, SEMA serves as a watchdog to ensure that civil servants are less likely to ask for money for services that should be free of charge, for example.
Natalie Dijkman received the Anti-Corruption Excellence Award on International Anti-Corruption Day in Kigali, Rwanda. The UN and the Rule of Law and Anti-Corruption Centre are the initiators of the award. The award is worth a total of one million dollars, divided into four categories. Natalie's start-up won the award in the Innovation category.
By means of a traineeship programme, SEMA is working with students from the University of Kampala (Makerere University) on qualitative data collection, through which citizens can indicate what they thought was good or bad about the service provision. These data are presented to the various public services on a monthly basis, allowing each police station to find out their precise corruption rate and average waiting time.
Nathalie Dijkman is currently spending six months in Kampala (Uganda) to reinforce the SEMA team. Among other things, she is hiring a local director who will continue to lead and expand SEMA in Uganda.
The Amsterdam Law School's Start-up Incubator programme is intended to provide students, staff and alumni with professional guidance when starting up a successful company in the field of rights and legal services. Although start-ups of all kinds and sizes can participate, the focus is on companies that aim to make the law accessible to a broad target group and have a social impact. The Law Hub's start-up programme is part of the Amsterdam Law Practice, the programme with which the Amsterdam Law School aims to build a bridge to society.