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.

Sheila Keetharuth is the Chairperson of the Coalition for an Effective African Court, a loose coalition of national and international NGOs, national human rights bodies and individuals that was founded in 2003 to promote the establishment of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.  The Coalition was one of the key organizers of the Roundtable on Regional Human Rights Systems in Arusha, Tanzania.  I sat down with Ms. Keetharuth to discuss the conference and the Coalition’s next steps.

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.

 

During the week I sat down with two conference participants to discuss their differing views of the appropriate relationship between courts and commissions in regional human rights systems.  In the African system, cases can be submitted directly to the Court by state parties to the Protocol creating the Court, African intergovernmental bodies, the Commission and individuals and NGOs when the state involved has formerly approved such actions.  In the Inter-American system, cases go first to the Commission, which refers cases to the Court.

The participants are Ibrahim Kane, Focal Point for the African Union (AU) Coalition for an Effective African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and Carlos Ayala, President of the Andean Commission of Jurists and a former commissioner of the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights.

Q: Both the Inter-American and African human rights systems are made up of a commission and a court. What do you see as being the proper relationship between the two?

Mr. Kane: The African system has a quasi-judicial body (the African Commission) and a judicial body (the African Court).  Currently, the quasi-judicial body is not very effective: only 14 percent of its decisions have been implemented.  Because of this track record it is important for the continent to have a judicial body that is stronger on enforcement.

The Commission is currently mandated to both promote and protect human rights. It promotes human rights through country visits and fact finding missions, for example.  It protects human rights by hearing and ruling on cases.  The Court, on the other hand, just has a protective mandate.  In my opinion, we need a system that both promotes and protects.  However, when the Court is fully functional, the Commission should assume solely a promotional function and delegate the protective function to the Court.  In practice that would mean that only the Court would hear cases.  The Court’s protective mandate will be enhanced by the merger of the Court with the proposed African Court of Justice.  Under this proposal, the Commission would supplement the work of the Court by undertaking investigations on key human rights issues that could then shed light on cases before the Court.

Mr. Ayala:  From the Inter-American perspective, the Commission has played an important role in protecting human rights.  The Commission does have a vital promotional mandate under which it conducts in-country visits to learn about human rights situations.   It then issues reports that relate its findings and offers recommendations and conclusions.  Because of the combination of facts and recommendations, the reports play both a protective and promotional role with regard to human rights.  Rapporteurs also conduct investigations and are important in bringing human rights issues to the attention of the Commission and the public.

The Commission has also played an important role in hearing cases.  Every year it has over 1,000 cases in process.  In these cases it reviews admissibility and issues a final report on the matter.  When it finds a violation of human rights it refers the matter to the Court.  As the jurisprudence of the Inter-American system has expanded, the number of cases coming before it has increased.  The Court does not have the capacity to review all of the cases itself so the Commission plays a vital screening function.  In addition to reviewing admissibility the Commission will also withhold cases deemed weak or concerning areas in which the Court is not ready to issue progressive jurisprudence.  If the Court were to receive cases directly it would need a significantly enhanced budget of about $100 million USD and a staff of at least 80 lawyers.  [Note: According to the Project on International Courts and Tribunals, in 1998, the Inter-American Court’s budget was 4 percent of its European counterpart’s budget.]

I am in favor of individuals’ access to the Court.  But in Latin America there are so many cases stemming from the number of massive and gross human rights violations on the continent.  There are too many cases for the Court to currently handle given it capacity.  The European Court of Human Rights has faced such a problem as the number of countries under its jurisdiction increased in the 1990s and early 2000s as did the number of cases.

Mr. Kane: It is true that the European system is struggling with the number of matters it receives.  The European Court has a backlog of 60,000 cases.  It is trying to change the rules to limit access, such as only accepting cases that would add to the Court’s jurisprudence, but it is facing resistance from some European countries.

For more blogs on the conference and the African Court in general visit the Global Network for Justice Initiatives. 

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.

 

 

I laugh, protesting that I have indeed been to the east side of town, but I agree that it would be a welcome change to meet them at the apartment on Mountain Cut Road where they are staying.

Wednesday evening I phone my driver, Sheriff, and ask him to pick me up at 8:00pm.  He picks me up just after 8, and I give him the apartment address.

"Now you're going to my neighborhood," he notes.  "You have friends on the east side!"

Mountain Cut Road is located off Kissy Road, one of the major commercial thoroughfares in eastern Freetown.  While much of the west side shines at night from the generator-produced light of expat and middle class Sierra Leonean homes and businesses, the east, in some ways, feels more alive.  Men, women, boys and girls teem from the shops, tiny bars and  homes that crowd and lean precariously against the edge of the road.  Some shops are fortunate to have a generator but most buildings and street stands are lit by flickering kerosene lamps. 

Eastern Freetown is the most densely populated part of town, and it is also the area most affected by the rebels' invasion in 1999.  Later that night, when I am driving home and most people have left the streets, I will feel like I am in a western ghost town--streets lined with shuttered general stores and second floor balconied apartments pockmarked with scars from the war and covered with dust from the seasonal harmattan wind.  For now, though, the streets are full and bustling with almost overwhelming activity.  Mountain Cut is so clogged with pedestrians that our vehicle can barely inch forward. 

As we drive down Mountain Cut Sheriff and I both lean forward, trying to spot number 15--the home of Dr. Mohammed Barrie, the Sierra Leonean doctor who runs the health NGO Dan started here.  Most of the buildings are unmarked and we end up back tracking several times and asking for directions.  At one point, Sheriff gets out of the car and my eyes follow him as he disappears into the crowd.  I feel very conspicuous--not only am I the only foreigner around but I am sitting in a bit white NGO-owned SUV.  Maybe I should have chartered a taxi, I think to myself.

Sheriff comes back with directions and we find a parking spot on a side street.  We climb out of the car, pick our way up the broken pavement to the main road and ask a group of young men on the corner if they know Dr. Barrie.  They point to a glowing store front a few buildings down, where we are met by a short, round man--Dr. Barrie.

"So you are Dan and Anne's friend," he says, shaking my hand.  As Sheriff excuses himself, Dr. Barrie leads me to the side entrance of the building and we climb the stairs.  The store generator lights the first two floors of the building, but as we rise the power goes out and we are enveloped in darkness.  We reach the apartment and the door is answered by a young female relative of Dr. Barrie's carrying a candle.  The apartment is dark but lovely with gracely arched entryways and a wide balcony. 

Dan and Anne come to greet me, and along with Dr. Barrie we carry chairs and cold beers from a bar below upstairs to the roof.  We begin to discuss our experiences in Sierra Leone and the health NGO that Dr. Barrie and Dan started one year ago.  Anne is in the country as a program intern until April as she applies to medical school.  The NGO, the Global Action Foundation, has two components.  The first is a clinic in Kono District near Guinea that provides free medical services to war amputees and their families.  Kono District is one of the most war-ravaged districts in the country, is a center of the country's mining industry and has one of the highest concentrations of war amputees in Sierra Leone.  The clinic opened on January 20, 2008, and receives funding from the U.S. embassy.  Prior to the opening of the center services were provided in a mobile clinic.  The clinic is open to all community members, and to date about 1,600 people have received services, including 500 amputees, war disabled and their dependents.

The second component is a child survival program, known as the "Severely Malnourished Project" based in Port Loko.  This district, just east of Freetown, has the highest prevalence of severaly malnourished children in the country.  With support from UNICEF, the program has provided therapeutic milk formula to the Port Loko hospital and has trained 480 local women as health promoters.  Dr. Barrie explained that the program initially trained a core group of women to conduct house visits to identify severaly malnourished children.  These women have, in turn, trained other women to perform the same tasks.  Once children are identified as potentially severely malnourished they are referred to the local Peripheral Health Unit (PHU), which conducts the height for weight assessment to determine the level of malnourishment.  Severely malnourished children are then referred from the PHU to the program's partners at the hospital for treatment.

While the child survival program has had many successes, it has run up against several challenges, Dr. Barrie explained.  The PHUs, for example, charge referred patients for services, and most Sierra Leoneans simply cannot afford to pay.  I have seen this problem before with other NGO projects; even when the NGO provides the PHU with money for drugs and supplies to prevent patients from being charged, they are still usually forced to pay.  Dr. Barrie also reported that it can be a challenge to make sure that equipment does not go missing from the PHUs, another problem I have repeatedly heard about. 

Overall, though, Dan, Anne and Dr. Barrie are upbeat about their work.  In addition to the new health center for war disabled, plans are underway to eventually bring on a senior nurse and six community-trained nurses in Port Loko to provide basic services to severely malnourished children.  Monitoring and evaluation is taking place to determine how to make the programs more effective.  

Sitting on that roof, watching the lights flicker out across the hills as the night wears on and exchanging ideas and information about this work, I feel suddenly energized and hopeful about the possibilities for creating real change for people in Sierra Leone.   It's about midnight, and Sheriff is back to pick me up.  I arrange to meet Anne and Dan once they are back from Kono the next week and assure them that I will be visiting their new health center soon.

In the next month I will travel to Kono in the east of the country to observe IRC's child survival program and to visit a new community health center that two fellow Princetonia