Alyson in Africa

I arrived in my hometown, Cincinnati, on Friday, September 12th.  I was sitting down to write my final blog post yesterday, when suddenly the power in my apartment went out.  This wasn't a complete surprise - the remnants of Hurricane Ike were sweeping through the mid-west and the winds had been knocking branches off the trees all morning.  I assumed that the power would be up in a few hours, but as day turned into night I found myself back in a familiar situation.  Just like times in Sierra Leone, I was dealing with no electricity,  limited food (as the grocery stores closed due to the storm) and uncertainty over when amenities would be restored.  I woke this morning to learn that about 200,000 people in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky are without power - some are also without water - and that the situation could continue for up to a week.  And I thought I had left this all behind when I left Africa!

In places like the United States, we often assume that we are light years ahead of "developing" countries like Sierra Leone.  Yet despite our advantages in terms of quality health care, technology and availability of public utilities, our society remains deeply vulnerable to shocks, whether they be natural or man-made.  Just looking at a place like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina reminds us that, in many ways, we are not that different from most people around the world.  This is a truly humbling realization.

A day and a half after the storm wiped out our power in Cincinnati, a few businesses are running on generator, and I was able to find an internet connection at the local library.  This experience hasn't been particularly dramatic, as far as storms go, but it has highlighted some of the lessons I have taken away from my time in Sierra Leone. 

First, have a good flashlight with you!  I am so glad that I did not leave my two flashlights in Sierra Leone.  Second, patience is key.  Things do not always work out the way you plan and if you want to keep your sanity you just have to go with it.  Third, you can survive - and actually be happy - with a lot less stuff and technology at your disposal.  Finally, other peoples' experiences often seem remote and exotic.  At the end of the day, though, when you are patient, open and willing to question your own assumptions and biases, you learn that we actually have a lot in common.  In some ways, Sierra Leone feels very far away now...but when I don't have any power I feel like I'm there again!

Finally, thanks to all of you who have followed my adventures this year.  Your comments, questions and messages have been interesting, informative and encouraging.  And thank you to Social Edge for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts and experiences online!

The report was released in January 2008, and it explores the ways in which international aid is distributed and accounted for in Sierra Leone.  There are three main channels of foreign aid coming into Sierra Leone, and they generally mirror the aid structure in other developing countries.  The first channel is direct budget support.  In Sierra Leone, the World Bank, Department for International Development (UK), African Development Bank (ADB) and the European Union provide more than a quarter of their aid to the Government of Sierra Leone as direct budget support.  The second channel is program support.  This aid is included in the Government's budget but is not paid into the Government's general account.  This money is tied to a specific program that is administered through a government Ministry, though the direct implementer can be the ministry or another partner like a donor.  The third channel is donor assistance to NGOs like CARE, IRC, PLAN, etc, which does not go through the government but is still recorded as aid to Sierra Leone. 

Any country receiving direct budget support from donors has to meet a number of preconditions to even be considered.  First, the country must have sound macroeconomic policies, meaning that they are completing an International Monetary Fund (IMF) program successfully.  Second they must have basic respect for democracy and human rights, as defined by the various donor governments.  They must also be able to assure the donor that they have an effective fiscal policy in place and that their financial system is rigorous and accountable in its use of funds.  Finally, the country must be implementing a poverty reduction strategy.  Each of these requirements is reasonable given how weak government institutions can be in countries like Sierra Leone.  

At the same time, the system can pose major challenges to the recipient government.  In any given year, the Government of Sierra Leone does not know how much budget support they will receive from donors.  Each year, the Government and donors agree on a Progress Assessment Framework that measures the government's progress against a range of benchmarks.  Based on an assessment of the government's progress toward these benchmarks, the donors then decide how much budget support to provide for the closing fiscal year.  In 2007, concerns with Sierra Leone's macroeconomic situation led the donors to withhold all of their budget support--placing the government budget in a huge bind because they had been working off a budget that anticipated support from these donors. 

This is just one of the many issues with aid and accountability that are explored in EURODAD's report.  EURODAD is also working on similar reports in a range of other countries, which should provide a great picture of how international aid works globally.  These reports should be available in the next few months so check their website for updates.

According to a report produced by Rebecca Surtees for UNICEF in 2005, many children in Sierra Leone fall prey to trafficking when they move from rural to urban areas in search of work or education.  Many cases have been documented of relatives or other adults offering to take rural children to district capitols or Freetown to receive an education then forcing them to hawk goods on the street, work as domestic servants or, in extreme cases, work as petty thieves, miners or prostitutes.  While there are also documented cases of trafficking across borders for sex and labor, internal trafficking is particularly pernicious because it is often overlooked or misunderstood by communities.  Rural families often depend on extended families in urban areas to assist their children in accessing education.  Surtees’ report noted that this internal migration is generally seen as a part of Sierra Leonean culture, and many people are not aware of the abuses that could face their children as they travel away from home. 

Sierra Leone passed an anti-trafficking act in 2005, which established a legal structure to deal with trafficking in persons as well as a national taskforce to coordinate protection and prevention measures.  Unfortunately, most of the taskforce’s money comes from the US Embassy in Sierra Leone; there are few other donors to support this work.  (Apparently, ECOWAS could also come onboard with funding in the near future.)  The taskforce depends a lot on the work of a handful of international NGOs to address trafficking in persons: the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Faith Alliance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAAST) and Defense for Children International (DCI) are the primary players, along with UNICEF. 

Part of my research is to begin identifying local structures and organizations that are working on anti-trafficking initiatives or that could be well-placed to do so.  The first structures that come to mind are the Child Welfare Committees in the provinces.  These committees are supposed to coordinate child protection activities in their areas of operation, but many are weak or non-operational as they receive little to no support from government.  Local NGOs working on this issue are also hard to find.  Please stay tuned to learn more about my research, and if you have any contacts in Sierra Leone that could be of help please feel free to leave a comment!             

According to the National Electoral Commission (NEC), which runs the country’s elections, 1,198 people will vie for positions as local councillors or mayors this July.  The majority of candidates represent the All Peoples’ Congress (APC) and the Sierra Leone Peoples’ Party (SLPP), the country’s dominant political parties.  However, in districts across the country, people are noting that the number of women on the ballot is distressingly low.  [Stay tuned for exact numbers later this week.] 

In Kailahun District, one of my Sierra Leonean colleagues working on election issues argued that women tried to secure nominations but that party leadership denied them the opportunity to run.  She noted that even women who currently hold local council positions lost nominations to male candidates. 

These days it’s popular to talk about including women in government but it’s rare to see parties actually follow through on their verbal commitments and back women for positions of power.  In December 2007, IPS ran a story that quoted leaders from the APC and SLPP promising that the parties would strongly support women in the local council elections:

"Women are going to feature prominently," said Victor Bockarie Foe, secretary general of the ruling All People's Congress, in reference to the candidates for local elections. Just over 11 percent of candidates that ran for parliament earlier this year were women.

There was more of the same from the main opposition grouping, the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP).

"We want to ensure that government is taken closer to the people," said SLPP Secretary General Jacob Jusu Saffa. "We will robustly support and campaign for women at the forthcoming local elections."     

My colleague in Kailahun, however, did not see women’s failure to obtain nominations as a result of men’s discrimination against women.  “Many women are not very well educated,” she noted.  “Their communities have been told by NGOs and the government that they need well-educated representatives so their support for the women has declined.”  My colleague’s perspective highlights the structural discrimination women face in Sierra Leone.  Clearly, if women do not receive access to educational and economic opportunities at the same rate as men they will also continue to face discrimination and marginalization in the political realm.

Some women are fighting back after losing a nomination, my colleague told me.  One woman in Kailahun District has decided to run as an independent after the SLPP failed to award her a nomination.  “She is loved by her community and they have urged her to run,” my colleague explained.  However, party loyalty runs deep in Sierra Leone.  Any woman bucking those structures will have a tough race on her hands.      

When I arrive, about 30 to 40 women--new and soon-to-be mothers--from the surrounding communities are sitting on rows of benches in the PHU's main room while traditional birth attendants (TBAs) in patterned skirts and head wraps sing and dance.  Their songs contain messages about safe motherhood and encourage women to come to the PHU for antenatal care and delivery.  The songs are the routine start to the pregnant women's support group that convenes monthly at the PHU to ensure that local women receive proper medical care and support during their pregnancies.

Sierra Leone has some of the highest rates of mortality and morbidity for new mothers and children under five in the world, in part because many women do not access medical care for themselves and their offspring during their pregnancies or after they give birth.  Even fewer make it to a PHU for the delivery.  According to the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Aide in Bangabaya, only one or two women a month give birth in the facility, despite the high numbers who attend the pregnancy support groups.  Women who do not give birth at PHUs are usually assisted by TBAs in their homes; unfortunately, the TBAs lack the drugs and equipment to deal with complications during delivery.  If things go terribly wrong, it can be at best difficult and at worst impossible for the Koidu Hospital's ambulance to reach the women in their villages.

This day, I am at the Bangabaya PHU with Dorice Manasseh, IRC's Child Survival Coordinator, to learn about IRC's new pilot project to encourage women to deliver at the PHU.  After an introduction by the MCH Aide, Dorice addresses the pregnant women directly, asking why they and other women in their communities do not come to the PHU to deliver.  The most common response is the distance between their communities and the PHU.  Dorice announces that the Bangabaya community, with support from IRC, is constructing a traditional mud brick house next to the PHU for pregnant women.  When it is completed, women who are expecting to go into labor can stay at the house for a few days and then access the PHU for delivery.

In addition to increasing access to the PHU, IRC is working to provide high quality care at the PHU.  IRC has posted a midwife to the Bangabaya PHU, redid the maternity ward (including providing lights powered by a solar panel) and is supplying basic drugs and supplies for emergency obstetric operations.  The hope is that by easing access to the PHU and providing top-notch medical care, more women will come to the PHU to give birth and maternal and newborn death rates will drop. 

As usual, however, there is one question on everyone's lips: will the community and the government be able to maintain these improvements after NGO support ends? 

On Monday morning, an IRC colleague and I drove to the Sengekoro PHU in Nimikoro Chiefdom.  It’s approximately a forty-five minute drive from our base in Koidu Town, down the highway with its broken concrete, past the mounds of sand and gravel of the diamond mines and then down a gutted dirt road that winds through thick, green bush.  The Sengekoro PHU is a humble four room building, and its staff currently serve 1,152 people in eight surrounding villages.  In previous years it served 4,064 people in 18 villages, but a new PHU has opened up nearby and the catchment area has been divided between them. 

In Sengekoro I meet Mabinty Samawaty, the Mother and Child Health (MCH) Aide.  Mabinty is assisted by Sahr H. Simbo, the volunteer vaccinator who administers vaccines to children under five and their mothers.  Mabinty also oversees 15 Community Based Distributors (CBDs), also volunteers, who monitor children under five in their communities for pneumonia, malaria (“fever” or “warm bodi”) and diarrhea (“ron belle”), three of the main causes of death in children under five.  When sick children are identified, the CBDs provide first line treatment and monitor the child’s progress.  If the child’s condition worsens, the CBD makes sure the mother takes the child to the PHU for further treatment.     

According to the MCH in-charge and new mothers I talk to in surrounding communities, the use of CBDs has improved child health in the Sengekoro PHU’s catchment area, as well as in the catchment areas of the 19 other PHUs with similar programs.  Previously, many mothers found it difficult to carry their children to the PHUs for treatment; most communities lack vehicle transport so mothers may have to walk for an hour or more down rough roads to access a health facility.  The CBDs provide free care in the communities themselves.  IRC has worked with these communities to select, train and support the CBDs, and last year the National Ministry of Health and Sanitation chose the program to scale up throughout the country.         

I was in the IRC office in Koidu Town, Kono Wednesday morning when I heard members of management talking about unrest among youths in the center of the town.  At a staff meeting that morning, the field coordinator announced that gangs of young people were blockading one of the main arteries of the town in protest against the government's refusal to allow them access to a sand tailing that many thought contained diamonds.  The youths claim that the government promised them access to this tailing during the last election. 

Around lunch time the situation had not improved and there were rumors that some youths had stolen a gun from one of the police officers trying to control the situation.  My coworkers began to head home just in case the situation worsened, and my housemates and I called a friend of ours out in the field close to the mining areas to tell her to head back to town and to our house.  When she arrived she reported that police were lining the highway and the main town roads and were heavily armed.

We spent the afternoon and evening in the housing compound, and this morning we were told that the youths had been dispersed by army reinforcements from the town of Makeni.  We were back at the office today and everything seems quiet.  More information on the events can be found here.

This unrest certainly is not new in Kono, nor is this the worst case in recent memory.  Similar protests took place in Kono in December, also over mining issues.  Property was burnt and destroyed and several residents were killed. 

One of my friends in Sierra Leone has commented that if the country destabilizes again the process will begin in Kono.  The area was hit hard by the war, and most young people lack education and employment opportunities.  As food prices increase and the local government elections in July draw near, tension among these young people is increasing.  When I travel in much of Sierra Leone, I notice the poverty and unemployment, but I also notice the hope among people who are working to rebuild their lives.  I tend to see Sierra Leone as a peaceful country with a promising future.  When I am in Kono, though, I begin to wonder if I am wrong.

Q:  What, in your mind, have been some of the successes of the Roundtable?

A:  The key successes have been the level of dialogue and the calibre of participants who have been engaged with the issues at this conference.  The sessions also allowed us to identify issues that we need to explore further, such as the relationship between the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the regional economic community courts [such as the ECOWAS Court of Justice and the SADC Tribunal].  We also have much to learn from the Inter-American system and the substance of what has been done there.  In all, it was a major success to have participants from the Inter-American system, justices of the African Court, representatives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and civil society members from across the continent at the conference and engaging with the issues facing the Court.

Q:  What are the Coalition’s next steps as the Court finalizes its rules of procedure and prepares to begin accepting matters?

A:  The Coalition was organized to push for the establishment of the Court first of all by lobbying states to ratify the Protocol [to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights that created the Court.]*  That objective has been achieved.  The Coalition is now establishing a base in Arusha, where the Court is based, to serve as a clearinghouse to assist civil society in accessing the Court.  Communication and travel is difficult across the African continent, so the Coalition will serve as an interface between civil society members and the Court by accessing and relaying documents, information, etc.  When the Court begins accepting matters, the Coalition will also offer a small office space for its members to access in Arusha.  In the long term we want to pursue capacity building activities for members, organize advocacy campaigns and assist those approaching the Court to access pro bono support.

Q:  Is the Coalition still engaged in lobbying states to ratify the Protocol, which establishes the Court’s jurisdiction over the ratifying state parties?

A:  We are continuing to push for ratification.  However, the AU is considering a draft of a new protocol that will merge the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights with the proposed African Court of Justice.  When the new protocol comes into effect the Court will become the African Court of Justice and Human Rights.  Once there is a new protocol, the Coalition will have to formulate a new advocacy message and again lobby states to ratify it.

Q:  What value can be derived from partnerships between practitioners and civil society members accessing the African and Inter-American human rights systems?

A:  There are many similarities between the African and American contexts, both in terms of the continents’ physical and cultural diversity and their histories of political repression and human rights abuses.  There is much we can learn from each other.  For example, earlier at this conference one justice of the African Court stated that the role of the Court would end once a decision was delivered and implementation would be left to the AU Council of Ministers, a political body.  In the Inter-American system, however, files are kept open and the Court conducts follow-up to determine whether the decision has been implemented and reparations made.  This may be something we want to advocate for in the African system.

Q:  What are some of the challenges facing the Coalition at this point in the Court’s development?

A:  The discussion on the merged Court is presenting many challenges.  We do not yet know what the merged Court will look like so it is difficult to formulate a clear and specific advocacy message.  We always have to watch the changing political context.  For now, though, we need to focus on advocating for the Court to begin functioning soon.     

*Note: 15 states were required to ratify the Protocol for it to enter into force.  The protocol was adopted by the AU in 1998 and entered into force in 2004.

Once in Nairobi I will hop a bus to take me across the border to Arusha, Tanzania, where I will be attending and blogging about a conference on the new African Court for Human and Peoples' Rights.  The conference is organized by the Cyrus Vance Center for International Justice, the East Africa Law Society, the Foundation for Human Rights Initiatives and the Kenya section of the International Commission of Jurists.  I will be blogging for the website Global Network for Justice Initiatives and cross-posting to this site.  Please stay tuned for exciting updates, including my trip to Lungi Airport which now involves a ferry since the helicopter across the bay has been grounded!  It's always something in Sierra Leone....

Take a look at the practice of major donors:  The European Commission requires that its grantees report on the ways in which their projects promote gender equality and the rights of the disabled and other minorities.  USAID recently came out with a call for proposals with the theme of “Transforming Sierra Leone: Linking Democratic Governance, Economic Growth and Natural Resource Management, While Empowering Women And Youth And Building Institutional Capacities.  At least on paper, women’s empowerment has been mainstreamed into the development industry.

In order to promote women as leaders and equal partners with men, many NGOs strive to include an equal number of women and men nationals as program staff.  An American friend of mine working for a small Sierra Leonean NGO recently expressed skepticism of this strategy.  She noted that her NGO trained a number of women volunteers in one rural district to monitor child nutrition via house-to-house visits.  Children identified as malnourished are then referred to a local health unit for follow-up care.  In this case, however, the Sierra Leonean nurses working with the program noted that households were not listening to the women volunteers and were not taking their children to the health units for care as recommended.  The nurses then trained male community members to conduct household visits.  Apparently community members are increasingly taking their children to the health unit for care.

My friend used this example to argue that in conservative societies, efforts to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment can actually undermine a development project’s primary aim (in this case, reducing child malnourishment).  My friend argued that the cultural context often made it impossible to hire women for community outreach positions since they were not respected as authority figures in those communities.

While I agree with my friend that NGOs must take cultural context into consideration during program development and implementation, my experience at IRC has shown me that placing women in leadership positions within a program can indeed promote both women’s empowerment and the program’s other aims.  In February, I travelled to IRC’s field office in Kailahun, one of the poorest and most culturally conservative districts in Sierra Leone, to visit IRC’s Strengthening Democratic Governance program.  The program works through community mobilizers to encourage greater communication and collaboration between citizens, government representatives and other civic structures.  Supporting women’s participation in governance is one of the program’s objectives.

In Kailahun, I met Amie, one of two female community mobilizers for the program.  Amie’s position requires her to deal directly with local leaders as well as average citizens.  She explained to me that she has faced resistance from male leaders because of her gender, but that pressure has lessened as she has asserted herself with IRC support and community members have grown accustomed to her role.  In fact, she told me that several women in her community have told her that they have been inspired to seek office in the upcoming local election because of her leadership example.  Amie beamed with pride as she told me this story.

There are certainly barriers to women’s leadership in Sierra Leone, and NGOs cannot expect that their efforts to empower women will be unproblematic.  But if NGOs do not even try to promote women in positions of authority, they are missing out on a key opportunity to work with Sierra Leonean women in expanding the opportunities available to them.

Her blog posts on Sierra Leone are now up on the IRC website.  Click here for a particularly moving story that illustrates both how challenging it is for women and girls to access justice when violence is committed against them but also the progress that can be made when communities come together to advocate for survivors' rights.

March is shaping up to be a busy month.  I will be getting a crash course in program start-up as I work with our Gender-Based Violence team to launch a new program addressing violence against women and girls in Sierra Leone.  From equipment procurement to staff recruitment to budget management there are a host of issues that four cerebral years at university do not quite prepare a person to deal with!

Like many undergraduates (I completed my BA at Princeton University in 2006), I took classes and read books that grappled with the many contradictions and challenges found in the humanitarian aid and development fields.  Spending five months actually working with a humanitarian organization in a country that is at the cross roads of relief and development has certainly deepened my appreciation of these challenges.  This week some of my colleagues have been talking about a short film produced by Peter Brock, an undergraduate at Skidmore, as part of his senior thesis, which explores issues of foreign aid and development in Sierra Leone specifically.  This is how he describes his project, which can be viewed online here:

The unsettling coexistence of extravagant material prosperity and abject poverty in our world has caused many well-intentioned people in the more prosperous countries to worry about the condition of the poor. This concern has caused private citizens, corporations and even governments to donate their time, money and resources to the cause of development and poverty alleviation. Despite this deluge of support and the vast crop of NGO’s that it spawned and continues to sustain, the western world has faced considerable difficulty in its attempts to translate these copious resources into concrete improvements in the lives of the world’s poor. To explain these shortcomings, the most insightful critics of western development efforts identify our lack of local knowledge and narrow-minded approach as the root of our repeated failure.

Most of the West’s knowledge about the people of the developing world, and Africans in particular, come from heart-wrenching but superficial newspaper articles and TV news stories about genocide, famine and child soldiering. Even those westerners who wish to understand the issues of poverty and development usually find themselves reading reports from the United Nations or the myriad of NGO’s that make it their work to ‘end poverty’. As with the mainstream media, it is outsiders who almost always author these reports, and they are often written to please the donors who sponsored the project in question. While many western scholars have written lengthy critiques of the development industry and recommendations for its reform, I wanted to see what development efforts look like from the perspective of those they are intended to benefit. I wanted to know if we could gain insights into improving and reforming our development efforts by simply listening to those people whose lives we have sought to change.

With this purpose, I traveled to Sierra Leone, the world’s second poorest country according to the UN development index, and began to ask young students about the effectiveness of foreign development programs. As I had expected, the opinions I heard differed substantially from the hopeful and often self-glorifying accounts given by NGO reports and UN documentaries. These are their stories.

An interesting response can be found at the blog Meanderings of a Young Idealist, written by another young aid worker.  Stay tuned for my thoughts on this debate, and please post your thoughts here as well!

I spent the first week of my trip in Cape Town where I felt a world away from my life in Sierra Leone.  It is important not to trivialize the problems facing South Africa--the country is estimated to have a whopping 40 percent unemployment rate, HIV infection rates are very high and the country has been experiencing period power shortages--but it is also clear that the country is vastly more developed than most of its peers on the continent and that the benefits of development are more broadly shared than they are in Sierra Leone.

Arriving in Cape Town felt like returning home to the States, while arriving in Maputo at first felt like arriving home in Freetown.  The airport was small and uncrowded, the cityscape was a bit worn but still beautiful against the blue of the ocean, and the landscape reminded me of Sierra Leone with its palm trees and tall grass turning brown under the intensity of the sun.  Even Hollywood thought the similarities were sufficient to film the Sierra Leone-based movie Blood Diamond in Mozambique.

Like Sierra Leone, Mozambique is a post-war country.  After gaining its independence from Portugal, Mozambique became embroiled in a civil war that lasted until 1992.  Mozambique began to rebuild as Sierra Leone was embarking on its own civil war and 10 years before that conflict would be resolved.  That extra decade of peace has contributed to some dramatic differences between the two countries.  Maputo has shopping malls and movie theaters, frequented by expats of course but also by members of the Mozambican middle class.  You can walk into one of the new grocery stores and choose from an entire aisle of cooking oils.  Stores and restaurants accept credit cards, and ATMs can be found on almost any major street corner.  None of these services, which are taken for granted in most of the world, are available in Sierra Leone.

Mozambique also has a thriving tourist industry.  I spent a few days in Tofo, a beautiful beach about 8 hours north of Maputo that is renown for its diving and snorkeling.  Air service is available from Johannesburg straight to Inhambane, the nearest town, to cater to tourists coming from South Africa.  The beaches in Sierra Leone are just as magnificent, but there is no infrastructure to faciliate tourists access to the beaches or to accommodate them in more than the most basic style.

I do not mean to say that Mozambique is not a very poor country.  Much of the sprawling country remains under-developed, and many of the roads are as bad as those in Sierra Leone.  It is encouraging, however, to see that the country is rebuilding and developing.  Perhaps Sierra Leone will look like this in 10 years.

My colleague Ann Jones had a piece in Sunday's Los Angeles Times about the prevalence and horror of violence against women in post-war West African countries.  Even though the wars have officially ended in the region, Ann explains, women still face extreme violence in their communities.  Check out her piece here.

I meet Yeniva for a drink and a chat one evening at Plan B, a laid back wine bar along Lumley Beach in Freetown.  Yeniva radiates energy; it’s clear she hit the ground running when she arrived in Sierra Leone and hasn’t slowed down yet.  Her program, Excel, will provide supplementary classes for a select group of secondary school students to prepare them to take their qualifying exams and eventually to continue their education at the tertiary level. 

“The average class size in Freetown government schools is 68 students, and the emphasis is on rote learning rather than critical thinking,” Yenvia explains.  “How will students learn to be progressive citizens if they are just calling and repeating?”

Additionally, Yeniva explains that it is challenging for secondary school students to prepare for their qualifying exams given the large class sizes and generally poor level of instruction available in the schools.  Most students, she notes, end up paying for private lessons, which cost about $100 a course, a significant sum in Sierra Leone.

Enter Excel.  The program, once fully operational, will provide supplementary education classes to two cohorts of 30 secondary school students at the SS1 level (equivalent to ninth grade in the United States).  The program will support these students with supplementary classes through SS3, when they take their qualifying exams.  Students will be recruited from 12 secondary schools in Freetown, representing a mix of government-run and private schools.  The program aims to work with students with high academic potential but from under-privileged backgrounds, whether they attend private or public schools, Yeniva explains.  Excel will also work with about 25 teachers a year to strengthen their background in key areas such as child development and lesson planning.

Herself a teacher for many years in Los Angeles, Yeniva understands the challenges of providing a holistic education in resource poor environments.  Before those hurdles can be faced, however, Yenvia is busy with the details of setting up a new project in Sierra Leone.  Excel is supported by Sierra Visions, a U.S. nonprofit run by Sierra Leoneans living in the United States that supports a range of development projects in Sierra Leone.   Yeniva and her colleagues are also in the process of fundraising.  Most of Excel's funding comes from private donors, but they are hoping to broaden their financial support to include foundations and possibly private companies.  This comes on top of the process of selecting schools partners, selecting students, hiring local staff and setting up an office!

To follow Excel's development over the year visit Yeniva's blog at Sierra Vision's website. 

It takes about an hour to drive the 17 miles from Kailahun Town to Koindu, along gutted dirt roads that dip at bone-rattling angles.  Driving into Koindu the first thing you notice is the houses: once-solid stone and brick structures with slender columns, sweeping arches and wide verandas are now charred with thick bush sprouting out the remains of windows and creeping over half-destroyed walls.  The elegance of the buildings speaks to Koindu's past as a regional trading hub.  Prior to the RUF invasion in 1991 Koindu's weekend market attracted traders and merchants from across Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.  Relatively well-off Sierra Leoneans lived alongside Lebanese traders who ran a maze of stores alongside the outdoor market in the center of town.  Rebels razed the town during the war, however, and according to the town's residents the market has not recovered.

My car drove into the center of Koindu around mid-day where one of my co-workers had assembled the town's leaders to speak to me.  After four months in Sierra Leone I still cannot get used to the fact that half a town will turn out to meet me because I am a foreigner and I work for an international NGO.  The town representatives included Koindu's District Councilor, ward commitee members (the governing body below the District Council), Women's Action Group members, the head of the market women's association, and local school teachers.  Even the local paramount chief made an appearance.  The presence of so many town leaders was not just a testament to the power of foreigners to draw a crowd but also to how little there is to do in these remote towns.

The residents of Koindu shared many problems that are common throughout Sierra Leone: a lack of good roads, a lack of quality water and food, a lack of decent medical care, a lack of jobs.  Time and again, though, talk returned to the market.  Even with peace in the region, trade has not picked up again in Koindu, the locals reported.  Several of them walked me through the old market--an assembly of stalls made out of rough sticks and lumber where townspeople sell groundnuts (peanuts), peppers, small fish and other small items of produce.  There appears to be hope within the international community, however, that things will change for Koindu.  The World Bank funded the construction of a gleaming new market complex a five minute drive outside town.  The new concrete structure contains 16 stalls with heavy metal doors for security.  The compound has not yet opened; one of the ward committee members said that the town was waiting for the District Council to come and inaugurate it. 

The new market was my last stop on my visit.  After surveying the site I got back into my car and drove away from the immaculate new stalls, past children playing hide-and-seek in the burnt shells of the old homes lining the dirt road.

Kailahun District lies just east of Kenema and Kono and borders Liberia.  The tip of the provine is where Revoluntionary United Front rebels, backed by Liberia's Charles Taylor, first invaded Sierra Leone in 1991.  Given its strategic placement between Liberia and the major diamond mining areas in Kenema and Kono, Kailahun and its people suffered a great deal of loss and destruction during the war. 

I am heading to Kailahun to visit our democratic governance program, which brings local government, civil society organizations and normal citizens together to address important community concerns.  I will also visit a Women's Action Group in Buedu, which works with IRC to address gender-based violence issues at the community level.  IRC is also running a very exciting program in Kailahun headed by long time writer and women's rights activist Ann Jones called the Global Crescendo Project.  Ann has traveled to Cote D'Ivoire, Liberia and now Sierra Leone where she provides groups of women with digital cameras to document their lives.  The women in Cote D’Ivoire and Liberia have documented powerful images of abuse suffered by women in their communities, and the resulting photo exhibitions they have organized have provided them with a platform to push for change in their communities.  To learn more about the project visit Ann’s blog at: http://www.theirc.org/special-report/ending-violence-against-women.html.

Please check back for updates on my trip later this week and early next!

Q. What new legal protections are provided under the Gender Acts?

 A. Sierra Leone operates under three sets of law: formal law, customary law and Muslim law.  The three Gender Acts—the Domestic Violence Act, the Devolution of Estates Act and the Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act—provide protection to women under all three types of law.

 The Domestic Violence Act is the first formal law in Sierra Leone to address domestic violence per se.  Prior to the Act’s passage, domestic violence could be prosecuted under the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861 as wounding or grievous bodily harm, but domestic violence was not a criminal offense in itself.  In 2006, there was only one conviction under formal law of a crime related to domestic violence.  Under customary law domestic violence was legal as long as it is “reasonable”—meaning no wounding occurred.  Just because the law did not cover domestic violence, however, does not mean it is was accepted in all parts of Sierra Leone.  There’s a common phrase regarding domestic violence in many small villages that translates to “she was not given you to beat her like a drum”.  Although a special unit (the ‘family support unit’) was established in 2001 within the Sierra Leone Police to deal with incidents relating to the family, and the vast majority of reported cases involved domestic violence, the unit has arguably made few inroads into addressing the issue. Without the support of the law, mediators within the Units found they could do little more than call up the victim’s husband and beg him to allow her to return home - a situation which unit staff members report to find very dissatisfactory.

The new law makes domestic violence a criminal offense, and strengthens the ability of the police and Family Support Units to respond to domestic violence.  People can also bring civil proceedings under the law, for example seeking protection orders.  The law provides a broad definition of domestic violence, including economic abuse (unreasonably withholding or destroying the other person’s financial resources); harassment; emotional, verbal or psychological abuse; intimidation; physical abuse and sexual abuse.  Marital rape will become an offence under the Act.  The broad definition has its pros and cons. On the one hand it will prevent judges from claiming that an act of domestic violence is not sufficiently grievous to fall under the law.  At the same time, the definition may be so broad as to be uncertain.

Prior to the passage of the Devolution of Estates Act, the law governing intestate succession varied across the three types of law.  Under formal law, wives only received 30 percent of their deceased husband’s property while a husband would receive 100 percent of a deceased wife’s property.   Under Muslim law, women were not entitled to administer estates and there was no legal guidance as to how property was to be distributed.  Provisions under customary law varied across the country, but generally marital property reverted to the husband’s family.  Widows are often ejected from the family home with their children.  In these cases, if they wish to remain in the home, they are often required to marry the deceased husband’s brother.  Under the new law, surviving spouses of either gender are entitled to remain in the family home until they die; it is now a criminal offense to eject them from the home.  Husbands and wives now inherit property from each other equally, and male and female children also inherit equally when a parent dies without a will.  Certain property under customary law still cannot be passed to a widow, but it remains a criminal offense to eject her from the home she shared with her husband during marriage.

Finally, the Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act still has some legal issues to be ironed out before it becomes law, but it should set 18 as the legal age for marriage, require consent of both parties for a marriage to be lawful, and provide that applications can be made for spousal and child maintenance of a reasonable level. This reinforces recent similar provisions made in the Child Rights Act 2007. The Act also requires that marriages be registered. Many women in Sierra Leone consider this latter provision to be particularly significant since men currently frequently abandon their wife for another woman and claim they are not legally bound to support her because they were not married.  The Act should also state that dowry and gifts given in the marriage do not have to be returned upon divorce, a provision which should stop the current practice of women being tied into an unhappy marriage because her family cannot afford to pay her way out.

What was the process of passing the Acts through Parliament?

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) originally funded two groups to draft the bills—the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee and the Law Reform Commission.  The problem was that these groups did not coordinate the drafting process and thus produced two different versions of the same bill.  The Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs (MSWGCA) was not taking the initiative to create a standard set of bills or push them through Parliament, so a coalition of NGOs and other organizations known as the ‘coalition on the gender bills’ came together to push the process forward.  I worked with the coalition to track down the bills, lobby the government to prioritze their enactment, provide training to women throughout the country on the provisions contained in the draft legislation, and provide legal support to the editing process.  Once the bills were printed, then-President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah issued an executive order so that the bills could be automatically passed by cabinet, and a certificate of urgency so that Parliament would be obliged to hold all three readings of the bills in one sitting.  There was a lot of pressure at the time to pass the bills quickly before the dissolution of Parliament and the national elections, and in the event the bills were passed in one day, led by the Minister of Social Welfare, just two days before Parliament dissolved for the elections. 

What factors created a favorable environment for passing the Acts?

Women in Sierra Leone have been demanding these laws since Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961.  Sierra Leone ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1988 but did not pass any legislation to domesticate the rights contained in the convention.  Sierra Leone is at the bottom of the Gender-related Development Index and donor pressure had also been building for some time. In the short term there was pressure to fast track the process from the coalition on the gender bills, which comprised representatives from Action Aid, the International Rescue Committee, Oxfam, the United Nations Integrated Office in Sierra Leone, and local NGOs such as GEMS and the Sierra Leone Court Monitoring Programme.  Government officials received additional pressure from the international community and local Sierra Leonean NGOs when they traveled to New York in May 2007 to defend the country’s CEDAW report at the United Nations.

Additionally, as the national Parliamentary elections [which took place in August 2007] drew near, political parties wanted to accomplish something that would appeal to women voters, who made up 48 percent of the electorate.  The coalition of organizations working on the bills lobbied MPs individually and in groups, and ensured that hundreds of women from across the country came to Parliament for the debates, wearing white, showing MPs that it was an issue close to the heart of women throughout Sierra Leone. This show of solidarity put a lot of pressure on the MPs close to the elections to pass the bills.

Now that the Acts have been passed, what are the steps that need to be taken to make sure they are implemented?

The coalition that worked to pass the bills is now working to keep the momentum and partnership going to push forward implementation efforts.  Already, implementation of the Gender Acts has been mainstreamed into the justice sector’s three year strategy.  It has also been prioritized in the UN Peacebuilding Commission Framework for engagement in Sierra Leone.

There is still a lot to be done, however, to make sure people are working together and not duplicating each other’s efforts.   A lot of groups, for example, are organizing training sessions across the country on the Gender Acts.  We need to make sure that these organizations are disseminating correct information about the Acts and that they are prepared to answer common questions the communities will pose.  It would be helpful to have a coordinating session both to map out where different organizations are working, discuss strategy and formulate a common training program and answers to frequently asked questions.

At the local level, education will be a major part of implementation.  Training needs to be held for family support unit staff, local councils, hospital staff and traditional leaders such as local and paramount chiefs on their responsibilities under the law and what their constituents should expect. Education sessions will also be held with local community leaders and members to educate them on their rights and mobilize them to promote implementation in the course of everyday dispute resolution.  Mechanisms also need to be developed to monitor implementation of the Acts and report back to a central body.

At the higher level, steps need to be taken to strengthen the Ministry of Social Welfare, which is charged with leading implementation, and the Family Support Units of the Police.  The Ministry of Social Welfare, for example, has the largest portfolio of any government department but the smallest budget.  In 2006, its budget was 500,000 USD, which mostly covered staff costs.  The Ministry is supposed to have offices and social workers operating across the country, but it does not have the capacity to carry out significant projects.  Social workers often go unpaid, and without transport or communication allowances struggle to attend to their communities.  In addition to lacking financial resources, the Ministry suffers from poor internal communication of information.  The Director of Gender, for example, never even received a copy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report.  Finally, the Ministry has little clout in the government, which is generally male dominated and little interested in “women’s issues.” Many of the Ministry’s functions should be carried out by other government agencies with oversight and coordination from the Ministry: unfortunately, the Ministry is currently not exerting such oversight and in practice most programmes required by its mandate are not being effectively carried out. Real financial and human resources need to be put into the Ministry to strengthen its position in the government and to build the morale and capacity of its staff to tackle its work.

The Family Support Units of the Police are potentially a very positive force for implementation of the Domestic Violence Act, and many people within the FSU are eager to work on this issue.  Like the Ministry of Social Welfare the FSU needs support in terms of skills building and funding.  Now that the FSU has the law it needs to prosecute domestic violence, its staff need to be trained in investigation and prosecution as well as how to monitor cases.  It is also important for the FSU to receive sufficient funding to follow-up with cases.

We’ve covered a lot of the challenges that will be faced with implementation.  Are there other challenges you would like to highlight?

Implementation will require real mobilization of local community members.  Women already know the problems in their communities.  There need to be extensive consultations with local women to discuss which implementation strategies will work and which will not.  These women know what will be accepted in their community and how to sell these bills.  Men also need to be at the heart of implementation.  Right now most of the implementers are women.  Paramount chiefs need to lead the way on the Acts, and encouragingly many of them have been supportive so far. 

Finally, we need to be aware of community attitudes toward gender based violence.  In many communities there is a perception among both men and women that women who dress a certain way are “asking” to be raped.  This is common even at the highest levels. During discussion of the bills in Parliament, for example, the Minister responsible for Gender suggested that it would be important to pass a dress code law that would prohibit women from wearing certain “provocative” clothing, as a means of reducing the escalating scale of sexual violence, which law would also prohibit men from wearing clothing generally considered to belong to women, such as earrings.  Additionally, one MP expressed concern that the dowry must be returned by the wife’s family in order for a marriage to end, as the whole purpose of the provision was to ensure that the woman didn’t run away from the marriage. ‘How are we going to stop them running away?’ he asked.  Well, yes, that was the original purpose of the requirement, answered the Speaker of Parliament, but that was precisely what the Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act was trying to change.  Even at the highest, most educated levels, there is still significant progress to be made.