Scott Family Fellows: Views From Liberia
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March 27, 2008
Here's your chance to become a fellow in Liberia!
Posted by Rebecca Schutte at 06:39 PM
We have begun recruiting for the next round of Liberia fellows who will head out to Monrovia this summer! Are you a young professional with a Masters degree (e.g., an MBA, MPP, MPH, or a law degree) and one year of related experience, or a Bachelor's degree with at least three years of related experience? Are you flexible, energetic, willing to work long hours and do both influential and mundane tasks in a challenging environment with constrained resources?
The current Fellows provide support to senior Liberian government officials in the realms of policy, speechwriting, ministerial coordination and administration (particularly in areas related to economics and finance). You can read about their experiences on this blog. This round, we are recruiting at least one person with a background and interest in generating economic and employment opportunities for young women. Liberians are especially encouraged to apply!
Under the leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia is stable and is working to boost economic growth, improve life for all Liberians and move towards a more propserous future. Do you think you have what it takes? If so, please click here to see the complete job posting and to get information on how to apply. We look forward to receiving your application!
March 21, 2008
Stand Up and Be Counted
Posted by Dan Honig at 08:40 AM
March 21st: Today's a holiday here, not because it's good Friday, but because it's census day. Imagine how excited folks in the US would be if they got a day off for this!
The day, though, underscores the importance of data and the poor data environment in which the Government of Liberia, and its partners, operates.
A few months ago, I was meeting with a donor who said, essentially, "I'm concerned. This government's been in power 2 years and unemployment is still 85%!" Ignoring methodological concerns for the moment (are informal petty traders unemployed? What about subsistence farmers?) the simple fact of the matter is that this, as with many oft-quoted government statistics, is entirely a fabrication. Basically, if you got the right few people in the room once a month, you could change the official rate, based on no data whatsoever.
Yet look at those famous Penn tables, or check out the CIA world factbook, and you're left to believe that there are solid numbers everywhere.
We all know numbers can be used to lie, to mislead. But sometimes, having any numbers at all is misleading. It's led me to start wondering: What purpose should numbers - everything from GDP to growth rate - serve? It seems to me that the answer to this is to inform planning - by government, by partners, by those looking to use your country in a regression analysis (hopefully not involving probits, I still don't understand those) to figure out the impact of x on y cross-country. None of these aims is served by having false numbers - what is served, I guess, is the statistician's desire for one less blank, the analyst's desire for a more complete data set that will get that 5% CI '**' after results, or the GoL or on-the-ground partner's desire for one less awkward explanation when someone from outside, or the home office, asks a question like "How many people are unemployed?"
Today, though, is another step towards building knowledge, towards information. After collecting a good deal of data in the run-up to the PRS, the census should give us solid answers to questions like "How many Liberians are there in Liberia?" We're all looking forward to that as a first step to having good answers to questions, and building up the knowledge, and data, that will allow for better planning for the government and donors alike.
In the meantime, let's start pushing the US gov't for a census holiday...
March 07, 2008
Standing with Liberia's First Female President
Posted by Robtel Pailey at 11:49 AM
[This article was published in the Winter ‘07-‘08 Alumnae Magazine for Georgetown Visitation, an all girls’ college preparatory school in Washington, D.C. It is posted here in celebration of International Women’s Day, March 8.]
Once upon a time, I was certain I’d someday be Liberia’s first female president. It was a foregone conclusion in my mind.
I’d always had an affinity for the country that I’d left at the tender age of six, one year before a brutal civil war erupted. I believed that though I wasn’t in Liberia, Liberia was always in me. So why not go back and make broad-sweeping reforms in the country’s post-war state, I thought to myself.
I remember penning an overly ambitious biographical sketch for the Georgetowner in my senior year at Visi; the words just flowed like a stream of consciousness torrent. My teenage angst and romanticism had gotten the best of me, really, but I had a smidgen of hope that I could set the record straight—the Guinness Book of World Records, that is. I was certain that my tough exterior and sharp intellect would help me navigate and infiltrate the heavily masculine “all boys network” of African politics, or world politics for that matter. That was a 17-year-old’s wishful thinking.
Needless to say, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf beat me to Liberia’s presidency in 2005 when she surprised everyone by edging ahead of the populist favorite, soccer star-humanitarian- turned-politician, George Weah.
Now I work for her.
I serve as a bridge between the Liberian executive and the general public, a connector, a communications strategist, a filter. I’m an information disseminator, of sorts.
No doubt Liberia has become the epi-center of my life’s journey to date. My path to the presidency has taken some interesting twists and turns—from harboring ambitions about being the country’s first woman president to covering the November 2005 elections for a local D.C. community newspaper. My naiveté certainly never prepared me for the day-to-day challenges of a female head-of-state.
The problems are many and the triumphs tend to pale in comparison. I’m learning a hell of a lot about what it takes to repave the foundation of a broken country, with broken institutions. There are a lot of broken people here. Some walk around with physical, emotional and psychological scars and wounds from the war, others attempt to hide them under a slight veneer of indifference. We’re essentially all walking on gravestones, and the reminders of 14 years of conflict-ridden under-development are stark.
The laundry list of necessities weighs heavily like a cloak: restoration of infrastructure, poverty reduction, job creation, debt relief, truth and reconciliation, rebuilding governance and the rule of law structures, high crime rates, illiteracy, free compulsory education for all, under-reported HIV/AIDS incidence rates. All these challenges and more would keep any leader awake at night. That’s probably why President Sirleaf, in all her 69-year-old glory, is usually the last one to clock out of the Executive Mansion. The thrill of watching first-hand from the sidelines as she and her Cabinet handle the Herculean task of rebuilding Liberia has been the ultimate roller coaster ride, and perhaps one of the real perks of my job.
In just two years of Sirleaf’s presidency, she has paved the way for balancing Liberia’s budget; clearing the country’s arrears with the World Bank, IMF and African Development Bank (one of the first steps in corralling Liberia’s ballooning $4.7 billion debt); restoring electricity to key pockets of the country’s capital after decades of darkness; renegotiating concession agreements with the controversial Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Liberia’s #1 employer to date, as well as securing a $1.5 billion contract with Arcellor Mittal, the largest steel producer in the world, to develop Liberia’s iron ore mining sector; restructuring the country’s military command; and instituting free compulsory primary education. These triumphs, and more, attest to the roving locomotive that is the Sirleaf machinery.
She’s a role model for many people, including me. The first time I heard President Sirleaf speak in front of a live American audience, I couldn’t help thinking, “She’s sharp, and a bona fide pistol.” The newly elected first female head of state in Liberia (and Africa) had to be that and more to pull off a victory in November 2005, against a slew of male candidates vying for the same political pie.
She has replaced history with a sobering dose of herstory.
She’s not alone. Whereas governments of the past have been mired in patriarchal fisticuffs over power, Sirleaf mitigated the masculine nature of Liberian politics by plucking five professional women from their former strongholds and placing them in high level government positions. Dr. Antoinette Sayeh, formerly of the World Bank, is currently Finance Minister, and Olubanke King-Akerele, formerly of UNDP, serves as Sirleaf’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. There’s also Varbah Gayflor, Minister of Gender; Etmonia Tarpeh, Minister of Youth and Sports; and Frances Johnson-Morris, Minister of Commerce. This feminization of higher politics parallels an increasingly active female electorate in Liberia, many of whom brought Sirleaf to the presidency by campaigning in local markets and influencing their children to vote for the woman affectionately dubbed “Ol’ Ma.” This prominence is not quite new: Ruth Sando Perry served as the first African woman head of state when she was appointed Council Chairman of Liberia’s ad hoc government during the Abuja Accords immediately before Charles Taylor’s election in 1997. But it is suggestive. The five female Cabinet ministers sit at the right hand of the ‘Ol Ma,’ accorded the same level of professionalism as their male counterparts. They speak with authority. They perform with a kind of legitimacy that was unheard of 20 years ago.
Liberia’s ethos has become a feminized ethos.:
Women, oh, women! Women, oh, women! What men can do, women can do it…What men can do, women can do it (better)! This is the chant often pulsating from circles of women, led by Liberia’s Gender Minister. With multi-colored lappas hugging generous curves and heads adorned with matching wraps, Liberian women often jump up, buoyed by these chants that legitimate their claim to a piece of the political and social pie. Yes, there’s a new energy in Liberia, and it’s primarily a feminized energy, an energy that exudes change.
Being a woman in Liberia nowadays is like waking up with a jolt from a long dream, and realizing that you were sleepwalking all along. Being female in Liberia nowadays is like claiming your own humanity as a birthright. Being a woman in Liberia nowadays is like recovering from a psychosomatic disorder, and realizing that you were conditioned to be handicapped.
But no more. Being a woman in Liberia nowadays is akin to a rebirth.
I see that rebirth everyday. Walking along Tubman Boulevard, a major thoroughfare in Monrovia, (Liberia’s capital), I see market women out on the streets selling candles, hot scalding ripened bananas, grilled fish, or even roasted peanuts. They are also in stalls, bartering for colorful fabric to be sewed by some of the most seasoned tailors. They stroll up and down with bundles strapped to their heads in the hot sun during Liberia’s merciless dry season. They are the country’s breadwinners. In the hustle bustle of city life, white-collar professional women dressed in power suits duke it out with their male counterparts for a space in rickety yellow shared taxis. They are heading to jobs that put food on the table. They are heads of households.
It never occurred to me why a single-sex education might be beneficial until I was plunged into a society seething with gender disparities, as are most societies in our globalized world.
It’s a testament to the fact that when you educate a woman, you educate a nation. We are the cultural transmitters, the incubators of history, a society’s mores and folkways. We are the conduits of peace and prosperity.
As a young Liberian woman who recently returned to the country in its post-conflict hey-day, I understand all too well how women have become the backbone of this country. President Sirleaf has shown me that you can be an ‘Ol Ma’ and ‘Iron Lady’ simultaneously. Gender, though a social construct, can be mutable and transformative.
My Georgetowner musings seem like eons ago, and a tad sobering. Being in the proximity of such strong powerful women is almost as thrilling, if not more so, than sitting in the throne of the presidency itself.
Thank goodness for life’s circuitous routes. Thank goodness for the feminization of politics.