Washington, D.C. — Fourteen years of war destroyed most of Liberia's schools and forced tens of thousands of children to become soldiers or sex slaves – or, in the case of many girls, both. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told a breakfast fundraiser in Washington DC for the Liberian Education Trust that the country cannot recover without educating its children. Dr. Deborah Harding, who launched the project, has been, among other positions, a senior program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and vice president of the Open Society Institute. She talked about the education initiative to AllAfrica.
When President-elect Sirleaf came to the United States in December 2005, she talked about the need for raising private-sector funds for education, because there were not enough funds in the internal budget to handle the need. The response was quite positive in the various fora where she raised the issue, so she asked me to set up an entity to raise money and work on restoration of basic education. So we formed the Liberian Education Trust (LET).
We set a very simple and clear goal for ourselves: to build 50 schools, to train 500 teachers, and to give 5000 scholarships to girls for formal education and to market women for literacy courses. We are a grant-making organization. We have made grants to a dozen Liberian NGOs [non-governmental organizations] for scholarships for 1200 girls – needy girls, including teenage mothers, dropouts, and Muslim girls.
The scholarship recipients are in many different counties – Lofa, Nimba, Bong, Rivercess, Grand Bassa, Montserrado, Bushrod Islands and Monrovia itself. We have given a grant to setup a partner organization in Monrovia—the Liberian Education Trust Monrovia, headed by Dr. Evelyn Kandakai, who is the former minister of education in Liberia.
We are now working on our next round of scholarships, which are for market women. We hope to have these literacy courses and these scholarships made in the next several months. With the rains stopping, we are hoping to start quickly to work on rehabbing and rebuilding schools. Unfortunately, we have not yet found a partner with whom we can do that. Although we are in negotiations with a couple of groups, it is a slow process.
We have raised U.S. $1.25 million. We will continue to raise money. As the president just said, the cost of construction material keeps going up. Cement is a commodity that is going up as fast as anything, so our original projections of needing $3-4 million is probably off by at least $1.5 million.
I work full-time as a volunteer. We have almost no overhead. The Phelps Stokes Fund has taken us on legally as a project of theirs. They provide us with financial and grants administration, for which we pay a modest fee. We have an advisory board whose primary responsibility is to help raise money. They pay the cost of doing that themselves, so there is no financial obligation there either.
One of the things that I am going to be working on, quite apart from LET but connected to it, is to try to raise interest in and funds for bilateral and multilateral sources to start a national literacy corps in Liberia that would be modeled on something similar to the Peace Corps or the French Voluntaires du Progres – a program where young, educated Liberians could be hired and paid a modest stipend to go out and teach literacy. With 70 percent illiteracy, two-thirds of whom are women, that is never going to get addressed unless there is a saturation approach to doing it. If we had a national literacy corps in Liberia, I think that it could change the situation appreciably in the next five years. Right, exactly. So you would need some structure around it, you would need some training in literacy, you would need some monitoring, and they would be paid a modest salary so it would help for people who are unemployed, as you know there is 80 percent unemployment in the country, it could take a couple of thousand Liberians and put them to work.
You would need some structure around it, but it might function best as an independent structure. I think it would have to be administered by Liberians.
The president was responsive and positive bout the idea and encouraged me to do up a design. I have been in the process of researching what other countries have been doing. I spent a lot of years in the Peace Corps, so I understand that system. I hope I will have something to suggest in the next month or so.
We have a website: http://www.liberianeducationtrust.org. There is [an online] pay system there or information on how to make a donation.
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It is very important for people considering supporting Liberia and/or LET to know there is urgency to this. The president underscored that in her remarks this morning. If Liberia does not succeed in making some of these changes between now and the next year or so, these things are not going to get fixed.
The rains have stopped; we have an opportunity to start building schools very rapidly, but we can't do that without raising additional funds. We have probably only 7-8 months in which to build. If you want to help us, you want to help Liberia or any of the other groups that are working there, please make your contributions as soon as you possibly can. Contributions to the Liberian Education Trust are 100 percent federal tax deductible.
As I said, we have almost no overhead. Anything having to do with expenses that I have incurred – a couple of trips to Liberia – were paid for by a separate grant. So any individual donation is going 100 percent – not 95 cents on the dollar, but 100 percent – to help build a Liberian school, train a teacher, or put a child into school who can't afford to go, mostly girls.
