Our Projects
Transforming livelihoods in post-war Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is one of the poorest countries in Africa. Currently it is recovering from the effects of an eleven-year senseless war, which displaced a half its population and maimed thousands of innocent citizens. Most of the of the people have now returned to their villages and are trying to rebuild their lives.
In 2003, Transform Africa and its local partner, Association for Rural Development (ARD), secured a grant from Baring and John Ellerman Foundations for an eighteen-month project to restore the vital artisan services and contribute to the longer-term needs of communities in five districts in Northern Sierra Leone. Through this project, artisans will be given small loans on a revolving basis to rehabilitate and restore the services they used to provide to local communities.
The project uses leadership transformationand gender transformation and community-based revolving funds as an entry point for peace building and socio-economic transformation of communities. This is because experience has shown us that, poverty among the rural and marginalised communities is largely a result of bad leadership, gender inequity in Africa and lack of cash.
The Sierra Leone project thus focuses on promoting good leadership and addressing gender inequity through economic empowerment to enable communities and community-based organisations, which work with them to take control of their resettlement and rehabilitation programmes. The role of ARD and Transform Africa is simply to provide targeted CBOs with seed money and technical support for establishing the revolving funds and training and accompanying them in leadership and gender transformation processes.
The project has changed the lives of several poor women and men and it has created employment opportunities for a considerable number of young men and women. The period covered by the Baring Foundation and John Ellerman grant ended on 31st December 2006; but the need for this kind of support it has exceeded our expectations even before the project had ended. Neighbouring communities were insisting for similar support to be extended to their areas. As a result, we applied and got more funding from Comic Relief. The project now covers 22 out of the 149 Chiefdoms in Sierra Leone. If funds were available, we would extend it to cover more needy communities.
