UK Trip for Sierra Leonean Teachers and Leaders

In February 2016, 10 of our Sierra Leonean staff came to the UK for teacher training, courtesy of the Steve Sinnott Foundation.

Widad Worneh, Malikie 'Leo' Barrie, Stephen Momoh, Fatmata Bangura and Mohamed 'Cobra' Bangura told us what they'd learnt and how they would take their experiences back to Sierra Leone to improve the quality of the teaching in our schools and beyond.

Watch their responses here

If you would like to donate to EducAid to assist us in continuing to train teachers to provide a quality education for some of Sierra Leone's most vulnerable young people, please click here.

After Ebola: Sillah’s Journey to EducAid

The World Bank identifies “orphans and vulnerable children” as a group requiring special consideration and intervention to protect them from a high likelihood of “negative outcomes.” These children “are more exposed to risks than their peers” and “most likely to fall through the cracks of regular programs.” These are the children that experience “loss of their education, morbidity, and malnutrition, at higher rates than do their peers.”

Sometimes, catastrophic events push large numbers of children very suddenly into this high-risk group. One such event was the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

And Sillah was one of those children.

At the beginning of the 2014 summer holidays, Sillah made the hour and a half journey by road to return home from his school. He was looking forward to a pleasant summer with his family. But soon after he arrived, the Sierra Leonean government declared a three-day lockdown.

Sillah’s father, a pharmacist with a good career that enabled him to pay the school fees for his son’s education, was asked to volunteer. Eager to help, he agreed to be a “sensitization” volunteer – someone who would provide information about the virus and limiting the spread of disease to members of the local community.

When he arrived at the center to begin volunteering, it was immediately clear that manpower was urgently needed for a different, more difficult and dangerous job – burials. Wanting to help anywhere he could, Sillah’s father joined the burial team and was tasked with collecting and carrying bodies from their final resting place to the gravesites. Typical of early-response health services during the epidemic, he was not provided with adequate training. Nor was he given proper protective gear to use while handling infected bodies.

Almost inevitably, he fell ill within a few days.

Sillah took his father to the hospital and two days later the entire family was quarantined – Sillah, his mother, his 12 year-old brother, and his three sisters (16 years, 10 years, and 19 months old) were all restricted to their home for 21 days – the maximum window of time for incubation of the virus (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/). If they were infected, they would show symptoms within those first 21 days and be transferred to a hospital for treatment. So they began to wait.

On the 17th day, the entire family began showing symptoms of the dreaded disease. They were taken to a hospital and crowded into an already over-taxed, under-resourced care center.

Only Sillah and his mother managed to survive.

Reeling from the loss of four siblings and one of his parents, Sillah was also worried about his future. Without his father’s income, he would not be able to continue his education. The disease, which had already taken so much from him, was going to take his future as well.

Fortunately, a journalist told Sillah about EducAid Sierra Leone, a system of schools run by World of Children Honoree Miriam Mason-Sesay. He pointed Sillah in the right direction and recommended he get in touch.

EducAid welcomed Sillah with open arms and he moved to the school in December. When he arrived, he was still very emotional, grieving his many losses. But he settled in as well as he could and began the process of resuming his studies.

Miriam immediately noted that, “he is generally amazingly cheerful and threw himself into being part of things: football, wood collecting, learning, cooking, whatever it was.” While it appeared that his previous school had provided poor mathematics lessons, he jumped into the subject and began tackling it with enthusiasm. “He has a quiet confidence,” Miriam said. “He will do well.”

Though a merciless epidemic caused Sillah unfathomable loss and thrust him into a “category” that made him likely to have negative future outcomes, EducAid was there to stop his falling through the cracks. This is truly what it means to protect children. World of Children Award is honored to support and stand with Miriam, EducAid, and all of their donors and community in protecting children – today by providing a safe place to stay and for the future, by providing the education they will need to survive and thrive.

Donate today to help protect more children worldwide: www.mydonate.bt.com/EducAidSL

Read more about Miriam’s 2015 World of Education Award: www.worldofchildren.org/honoree/miriam-mason-sesay

Learn more about EducAid by visiting their website: www.educaid.org.uk

This blog post is part of the World of Children Award Child Protection Blog Carnival. The Blog Carnival pulls together stories that represent the global breadth and depth of thinking and on-the-ground work that we and our fellow World of Children Award Honoree organizations are providing to protect children.

Visit the Blog Carnival to read stories from fellow Honoree programs protecting children from child-trafficking, abuse, neglect, and the vulnerabilities associated with being poor, orphaned, or disabled in countries as widespread as Colombia, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Mexico, India, Ukraine, and Haiti.

www.worldofchildren.org/blog/child-protection-blog-carnival

World of Children Education Award Winner: Miriam Mason-Sesay

This month, Miriam Mason-Sesay was bestowed an honour that few are worthy of. The World of Children award is an extremely prestigious and unique organisation that scours the plantet each year for the most effective change-makers for children worldwide, thus improving the lives of the most vulnerable.

The World of Children describes itself as an organisation that, since 1998, has invested $7 million in cash grants and programme support to more than 100 Honorees. They estimate that they have touched the lives of 30,000,000 children around the world, with those children being rescued, rehabilitated, educated, given counselling, and receiving urgent medical care.

The World of Children was founded by Harry and Kay Leibowitz. In 1996, Harry had a vision for World of Children when he was recovering from cancer surgery at age 55. Watching the Pulitzer Prize announcements on TV, he noted that while there was a Pulitzer for art and literature, and a Nobel for the sciences and peace, and an Oscar for films, there were no awards for those who were tirelessly serving children in need.

That realisation was a catalyst for Harry, and he subsequently founded World of Children with vital support from Starr Commonwealth. Harry then pledged to dedicate the rest of his life to creating a prestigious awards program, to support social change makers helping children in need around the world.

Harry Leibowitz believes that you don’t have to be Bill Gates to make a difference. All you need is a genuine desire to help. As Harry puts it:

"One little hand by one little hand by one little heart, we will fulfil that sacred duty given to us by our forbearers—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—for every child we can reach."

The World of Children say that each of the 2015 Honorees has created life-changing programmes that benefit children in countries around the world. They are working on a wide range of issues, including homelessness, teen pregnancy, and life-threatening medical issues.

At this year’s Awards Ceremony, World of Children Award will present the first ever Education Award. Asked about the decision to add an Education Award to the program, Leibowitz shared that the Board of Governors recognises education as a key component of elevating young people out of poverty, out of trouble, out of dependency, and on to a better life. He pointed out that 60 million children worldwide do not receive even basic education and that, in view of the magnitude of the issue and the large number of education-related nominations the organisation receives each year, it was vital to establish an education award category.

It is without a doubt a huge honour for Miriam to win this award, but one that we are sure you’ll agree that she wholly deserves. Miriam will be travelling to New York City next month to receive her award, and the event will provide the platform for Miriam to raise awareness and funding to continue the growth of our charity.

Congratulations to Miriam, and to the whole EducAid organisation without whom the high-quality impact would not be delivered. International recognition significantly helps those that are involved at EducAid to keep doing what they are doing, but it will not take our focus from what really needs to be achieved: the sustainable and holistic education of vulnerable children in order to raise them out of poverty, and to create a prosperous and corruption-free Sierra Leone.

If you would like to read more about the World of Children Award, or indeed other winners, you can find our more on their website: www.worldofchildren.org

Sweet Salone........Lurching from one crisis to another

Wilkinson Road flooded with cars swimming
through the flood waters.
Credit: M & R Ropiecki

Extraordinary scenes in Freetown for the last few days. 

Sierra Leone is back in the news again!

For a good reason this time?

Sadly not!

We had gone off the international media radar for many years, when the film Blood Diamond brought us a little negative publicity and reminded the world of the extremes of violence that had occurred during the 10 year war. As potentially positive news of economic change started to hit the media, we had the dramatic knock back of the year long Ebola crisis last year. Before we have even got to the end of that (despite the Western media having forgotten about it), massive floods have hit and there are currently close to 9000 people in Freetown displaced by serious flooding, damaged homes, landslides and so on.

Is there a common thread to all of this?  They seem so unrelated.  

By my analysis, there is a common cause, a constant source of vulnerability and I believe that the extremes of all that we have experienced would have been massively reduced if our population were educated.

The floodgates are open!
Credit: M & R Ropiecki

President Momoh, 25 years ago made the announcement that education was a privilege and not a right. (n.b. This has not changed in any real way in the intervening quarter of a century!)  This was a significant trigger for the student protests that were then militarised by Foday Sankoh - not the only but an important contribution to the starting of the war. There were then enormous numbers of marginalised, uneducated youth who had had nothing to lose by joining the fighting.  

When Ebola hit the country in early 2014, the confusion it caused was due again to the lack of education. There was a complete lack of trust in the sources of information and no means to verify which of the potential explanations was genuine.  There was often a panicked dismissal of government advice so people continued to hide and treat their sick and bury their dead, making themselves and their communities incredibly vulnerable.  

Now, with the floods, to me it is all of a piece. Education does not stop rain but.....

Freetown is massively over-populated as people abandon the provinces for lack of employment opportunities and lack of basic services such as education and health.  Families lose their land because they don't know their rights.  People build in vulnerable parts of the city because they don't have their own land and there is no properly enforced planning.  Environmental protection laws can be bypassed with a brown envelope.  

The injustices that are perpetrated against the people, the lack of equitable law enforcement is not even understood by those who are on the receiving end of it.  Were they to be educated, they would understand the rights they are not accessing.  Were they to be educated, they would know who to ask what questions to know why such a small proportion of what is allocated to the provincial district councils ever reaches them?  Were they to be educated, they would know that accepting no services is not normal in most countries.  Were they to be educated, they would know what happens elsewhere and demand justice and basic rights for themselves as happens in other countries.

My heart goes out to those who are suffering now but this is once again a symptom not the real problem.  We will help with rice, medicines, blankets and tarpaulins but these are sticking plasters on a deep deep wound.

In EducAid we believe that the best way of strengthening communities to reduce vulnerabilities to all sorts of crisis is through education.  

If you are interested in knowing more about EducAid's work with vulnerable young Sierra Leoneans please go to www.educaid.org.uk 

If you are in a position to support our work, please go to the Donate page of the EducAid website or direct to the EducAid MyDonate page  It is hard to imagine where your money could have greater impact!

Thank you in advance for your generosity.

Political Instability in Sierra Leone

The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), a special consultant to the UN Economic and Social Council, has issued a warning in the wake of the contentious, and potentially unconstitutional, sacking of the Vice President of Sierra Leone, Alhaji Sam-Sumana.

There are various factors at play, but the most threatening and sticky claim made against the president, Ernest Bai Koroma, is that he has broken the 1995 Constitution - a document that he swore his life to protect. As with anything like this, it is not a straightforward situation. There is a reasoning to argue that the President had not, in fact, acted unconstitutionally as the vice-president was dropped from the party by the president, and could not hold the office without membership to the All People’s Congress party at the time. This is something that will be decided by the Supreme Court of Sierra Loene. The opposition party, the Sierra Leone People’s Party, have their own agenda in causing the instability and smearing of the President. They are spreading their version of events and organising demonstrations to corral their voters in advance of the 2017 elections.

Regardless of the political tactics, there is general discontentment and fear within the public that the President has overstepped his mark, and is in danger of eroding the Consitutional rule of law that marked such a significant step forwards after the brutal civil war. This is certainly a dangerous precedent to set in a political system so immature and early in it’s developmental stages.

Rather than summarising a very concise and informative piece, I have included a link to the full article below. I will leave you, however, with the Conclusion:

“Political tension in Sierra Leone continues to rise amid a worrying hike in the number of new Ebola cases. The current political context threatens the fragile peace and security of Sierra Leone's emerging democracy, amidst the complex Ebola emergency. The expulsion of Alhaji Sam-Sumana from the APC and subsequent dismissal as vice president has stirred immense confusion in the country with reference to the 1991 constitution that stipulate the dismissal of a vice president with two-third votes of the parliament. However, the constitution also requires that the office holder should belong to a registered political party. In the light of this and the pending case at the Supreme Court, citizens are hopeful that the Court delivers a win-win verdict that clearly reflects the provisions of the constitution. This is imperative to prevent the country from plunging into further chaos.”

We will keep you informed of any developments in this matter, and the outcome of the Supreme Court case.



For the full article, please visit this link.