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.