Awande Mshotana is a South African social justice activist dedicated to advancing legal empowerment and access to justice for poor and working-class communities. Based in Cape Town, he serves as the Head of Education at the People’s Legal Centre, where he leads community-based paralegal training programmes that equip activists and leaders with community paralegal skills. Awande holds an LLB degree, cum laude, from the University of South Africa — a qualification he remarkably completed while incarcerated, reflecting his resilience and deep commitment to transformative justice.
In 2024 and 2025, he delivered a guest lecture at the University of Stellenbosch and participated as a panelist at the Flashlights Conference hosted by the Robert and Helen Bernstein Institute for Human Rights and the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative at New York University School of Law. In 2025, he was a panelist speaker at a side event during the thirty-fourth session of the Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice (CCPCJ) at the United Nations in Vienna, highlighting community-based approaches to justice reform with a focus on education not incarceration. Awande’s work embodies the intersection of lived experience, education, and activism in building a more just and equal society.