Vivek Maru is an American social entrepreneur and human rights activist who is a pioneer in the field of legal empowerment.

Namati and its partners have supported cadres of grassroots legal advocates – sometimes known as "barefoot lawyers" or "community paralegals"– in ten countries.

These advocates equip their communities to protect common lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.

[1] In a 2014 article, Maru complained that "when world governments adopted development goals 15 years ago, law and justice were left out.

"[2] As a result, while major progress has been made in the fields of health, education, and the reduction of poverty, access to law and justice has lagged behind.

[5] According to the ABA Journal, Maru nearly quit law school "because it wasn't presenting him with a Gandhian approach" to legal work.

[5] After Maru was invited by a friend, Simeon Koroma,[6] to help Sierra Leone in the wake of its civil war, they co-founded Timap for Justice, which developed a nationwide network of paralegals at a time when there were only about 100 lawyers in the entire country, almost all of them in Freetown.

[5] Namati has 186 paralegals in Kenya, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bangladesh, India, and Myanmar, who are part of a legal-empowerment network involving some 1,000 organizations.

He called the organization Namati, a Sanskrit word meaning to shape something into a curve, because of Martin Luther King Jr.'s statement that the "arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

[4][7][8] In 2017, the Schwab Foundation named Vivek and Sonkita Conteh, director of Namati – Sierra Leone, two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year.

[10] Op-Eds and Public Writing Journal Articles Books/Books Chapters/Policy Documents/Practitioner Guides He is proficient in English, Gujarati, Kutchi, Sierra Leonean Krio, and Hindi.