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September 28th, 2009 by Elizabeth BeresfordCeasefire Liberia
September 16th, 2009 by Ruthie Ackerman
The first time I went to Liberia in 2006 President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president in Africa, had been in office one year and young Liberians did not know what the future would hold for them after 14 years of civil war. New markets were being built for the women. Policy forums were being held for civil society leaders. Electricity was flowing to parts of the city that had never been illuminated. And children who only knew war were now going to school.
Yet despite the progress, there were former combatants who were still waiting to attend the rehabilitation programs promised to them at the end of the war. Some were amputees who lost limbs during the fighting. Many were now living on the beach or in abandoned government buildings because their families and houses were long gone. Even those who had been through rehabilitation programs found it difficult to get jobs as the economy staggered. Or they found the rehabilitation programs inadequate, with too few teachers, resources, or opportunities.
I wrote several stories about the young people I met and yet when I returned home to New York City I could not get Liberia out of my mind. As a journalist I had more questions: How are the Liberians who fled the war faring in the U.S.? Is America everything they dreamed it would be? What are their hopes and dreams for themselves and their country? I had heard that about 8,000 Liberians live in the six, six-story buildings that fill Park Hill Avenue in Staten Island, New York so I went to see for myself what their lives were like and get some answers to my questions.
I arrived in Park Hill just before sunset and walked over to the parking lot behind one of the buildings, where many of the young Liberians spend time hanging out. The hip-hop group, Wu-Tang Clan, grew up in the neighborhood and referred to it as "Killer Hill" or "Crack Hill" because of the violence and crack found on the streets. Refrigerators with doors unhinged, broken couches, and slabs of wood were strewn in a haphazard pile nearby. The air was filled with the stench of urine. The heat bore down. It was summer – the time when the young and able-bodied take to the streets to chat, unwind, show off, and drink their idle days away.
Many of the youth I met never got an education as schools were closed during the war. Some were forced to fight for warlord Charles Taylor, who is now on trial for war crimes at The Hague. Others fought for various rebel groups. America was considered the ultimate escape — the place where money was found on the streets and life was easy.
Welcome to Park Hill – the place where the realities of life as a refugee collide head on with the American dream. Out of my work with Liberian youth in both Liberia and Staten Island I created Ceasefire Liberia, a blog bridge between the Liberian community in Liberia and the rest of the diaspora. Its mission is to create a dialogue between Liberians who remained in the country during the war and those who fled.
What started off as one story about Liberia has grown into an all-encompassing multimedia project, including a book, documentary filmwork, and now a blogging project. The blogging project is very exciting for me because it is a way to hear directly from Liberians about their communities –no middlemen — just their voices about the things they care about. Ceasefire Liberia bloggers have written about everything – from the death of Michael Jackson, to the increase of armed robbery in Monrovia, to ways to improve the educational system in the country. And people are listening.
There are an active group of readers who comment on the blog, encouraging bloggers to continue with their hard work. After so much divisiveness and so many years of war it is good to see Liberian youth taking their future into their own hands and showing the world that when Liberia is ready there is a generation of youth ready to pick up the torch. I hope everyone who comes to the site can join us by writing an encouraging comment, reflecting on their own experiences, or telling us about their communities. The dream is that by communicating here the boundaries that keep us divided will disappear.
Check out Ceasefire Liberia at www.ceasefireliberia.com
Ruthie Ackerman is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute .
Focus on Five
September 4th, 2009 by Elizabeth Beresford
This year, the Women’s Refugee Commission decided to adopt a “five-country strategy” to more carefully focus our efforts on achieving change on the ground from what we’ve learned in our research and global assessments.
We have chosen to focus on five countries, selected because they represent different geographic regions, different displacement contexts (urban/camp, refugee/internally displaced/returnees, protracted displacement/newer emergencies/post-conflict reconstruction) and on the basis of our long-term experience in those countries. This does not mean that we will not visit other countries, but our ongoing focus will be on these five countries, which will provide case studies for ongoing global advocacy.
The five countries are: Northern Uganda, Thai-Burma border, South Sudan (and Darfur—if/when security permits), Liberia and Jordan. We will also include an emergency context, when an appropriate situation emerges, that we can track over time. The countries may be changed if the security situation does not permit frequent visits or if they are no longer helpful case studies for promoting our advocacy agenda.
Now that our areas of international work—reproductive health, gender-based violence, livelihoods, displaced youth, fuel and firewood and disabilities—are well-defined and unlikely to change in the near term, we can increase our attention on how we promote change—both in policy and practice—and how we monitor that change is in fact taking place and improving the lives of displaced women, children and young people.
Profile: Livelihoods Workshop Participant
August 25th, 2009 by Grace CheungNick Obot, Economic Recovery and Development Manager
International Rescue Committee (IRC), Lira, Northern Uganda
Nick Obot, left, with Carolyn Makinson, executive director of the Women’s Refugee Commission.
A high school teacher turned humanitarian worker, Nick Obot uses his managerial skills to help rebuild agriculture in Lira, northern Uganda, a region embroiled in a civil war for more than 20 years.
Two years ago under IRC Lira, Nick implemented an Economic Recovery and Development program that focused on agriculture, business skills training and a village savings and loan association, with funding from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). Using a private sector-led approach, the project served 1,900 displaced farmers in three sub-counties of Aloi, Apala and Abako in the Lira district of northern Uganda.
After the war, the farmers returned to their own land. Participating in Nick’s program, the farmers received agronomy training in how to prepare the land, select seeds and manage, harvest and sell the crops. Each phase of training took place during the appropriate season so the farmers could put their learning directly into practice.
After the harvest, farmers received business training, including market assessment, capitalizing on business opportunities, profit analysis and customer care.
Nick conducted an evaluation survey among those who participated in his program. Overall, the farmers were very happy. Having sold all their crops the first season, the farmers increased production the next season by purchasing bulls to till the land. A woman farmer started a successful business as a result of the training and won a groundnut sheller from the IRC to boost her business. Others bought motorcycles for transport and earned enough money to pay school fees for children and start other businesses.
The land produced groundnuts, sesame, rice and maize. Last year, sunflowers fetched a good price. This year, prices were even higher for rice. The demand for rice was very high, including for export.
Nick and his team realized that there was a big gap between the price of unmilled rice (0.35 USD per kilo) and the price of milled rice (1.2 USD per kilo). Farmers were paying road tolls, taxes and cost of transportation to mill the rice elsewhere. But if farmers milled the rice locally, they could fetch a higher profit and also feed their animals the rice bran, saving money in multiple ways.
The Women’s Refugee Commission is paying for two rice mills for northern Ugandan farmers in Lira to use, helping farmers save money and increase return.
With these two demonstration projects, Nick and his team have persuaded local private businessmen to purchase more rice mills and to manage the milled rice production from a business perspective. The farmers pay the same price to have their rice milled as under the old system, but they are able to save on tolls, taxes, costs of transportation and can keep the rice husks to feed their animals.
This summer, the Women’s Refugee Commission has been holding three-day regional livelihoods workshops in Ghana, Kenya and Bangkok to train UN, international and local NGO staff working on economic and gender-based violence programs with refugee, displaced and returning populations.
The workshop covers findings from our three-year research project on livelihoods in refugee, IDP, and returnee settings and includes practice sessions on how to use the newly released Livelihoods Field Manual . A day of the workshop is devoted to livelihoods as a tool of protection against gender-based violence. Nick Obot participated in our June workshop in Kenya.
Story told to Carolyn Makinson and edited by Grace Cheung
Liberia’s Youth: Skills for Recovery
August 12th, 2009 by Josh Chaffin
Note: To mark International Youth Day (August 12), we are featuring a blog post on the struggles young people in Liberia face in finding employment .
I’m talking to girls and boys about their lives in the suburbs of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, West Africa. The simple question, “What do you do with your day?” is painfully revealing. They describe getting out of bed, praying, brushing their teeth and drawing water from the community well. Then many of them go to “the hole,” a local quarry, to “bust rock” all day. Others haul sand illegally from the beach for use in mixing concrete. Universally, the kids say they earn LD100 (US$1.40) per day.
When they’re able to save up a little cash, they might buy a small stock of flip-flops or cheap household goods and sell them along the busy road to the capital. This is typical; most people in Liberia don’t have a proper job. Instead, they depend on two to five “hustles” that they can juggle to earn enough to pay for their daily bowl of rice.
Liberia is trying to recover from a 14-year civil war that left the country in ruins. Most people here, especially women and girls, have never attended school. The skills training infrastructure wasn’t much good even before the war, but now it’s in shambles. The Women’s Refugee Commission sent me here to look into opportunities for education and training that prepare young people for the world of work. The idea is to find durable livelihood solutions in an extremely underdeveloped economy.
Girls and boys in Monrovia, Liberia. Photo by Micaela Walker/Women’s Refugee Commission
The unemployment problem is not for lack of imagination; these young people have high hopes for the future. Asked what they’d like to be when they grow up, many say “doctor,” “lawyer” or “civil engineer.” One bright kid even said “demographer.” Several girls said they’d like to emulate President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and become leader of the country.
Unfortunately, not many have any interest in agriculture as a career (as few as 3% of the country’s youth, according to one survey). That’s a real crisis in a country where more than 80% of the rural population is “food insecure”; they face hunger on a regular basis.
Since the end of the civil war in 2003, tens of thousands of young people—especially ex-combatants and women associated with the fighting forces—have gone through trainings led by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in trades such as carpentry, auto mechanics, soap-making and tailoring, but many say they can’t find work in the fields they’re trained in. Too often, the trainees have graduated with a tool kit and some startup capital, only to sell their assets and go back to a hand-to-mouth existence in day labor, subsistence agriculture or petty crime.
Up to now, the training hasn’t been based on market demand for labor. NGOs also admit that their programs have not paid enough attention to monitoring and micro-enterprise support services for graduates.
In urban areas, the best programs seem to be the ones that connect young people to internships and apprenticeships with local businesses, and offer a continuum of services to get them set up with their own micro- and small businesses. Again, careful monitoring of beneficiaries and their businesses seems to be a key to success.
Many skills training programs now recognize that for most Liberian young people in the rural areas, agriculture is about the only option for a sustainable income. Perhaps the most promising practice in training involves a combination of farming techniques, literacy and numeracy, life skills such as conflict resolution and reproductive health, and micro-business skills like money management and connecting to markets. The goal is to get small-scale farmers producing greater yields and finding markets.
But again there’s the problem that young people just aren’t interested in farming. You can’t really blame them; too many have seen their parents and grandparents work the land their whole lives only to die in poverty. Major investments are needed in demonstrating to the youth that you can make money as a farmer, and in training them how to do it.
I’m trying to convince the government to start a program that gets young people to design their own campaign to change the negative image of agriculture as a career. Without too much effort, I believe Liberia could create a patriotic youth movement around achieving food security. Agriculture is where the jobs are going to be, after all.
NGOs and other groups doing skills training who want to make their programs more responsive to labor market needs should check out the Women’s Refugee Commission’s new Market Assessment Toolkit for Vocational Training Providers and Youth , developed in cooperation with the School for International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. It’s designed to help connect trainees with realistic livelihood options in weak economies like Liberia’s.
Josh Chaffin has held half-a-dozen jobs in Liberia since 2006, including managing a U.S. reintegration program for children and women affected by the fighting forces, editing the country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy 2008-2011, and helping to develop the UN Joint Programme on Youth Employment and Empowerment (UNJPYEE). He currently resides in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is developing guidance for UNICEF country offices on working with adolescents in emergencies.
International Rescue Committee
Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict