- The Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development is moving forward with plans to build a continental women's leadership campus in Monrovia, with its executive director declaring that Africa can no longer depend on Western spaces to shape its leadership future.
Speaking during a media engagement, EJS Center Executive Director Ellen Olounfe Pratt described the proposed Musiehjah African Women's Center as a hub designed to empower and connect women leaders across the continent, and said construction is expected to begin shortly.
"Africa needs to convene in Africa," Pratt said. "The reality is many of us cannot get visas to travel to Europe or the United States. So we must build our own spaces here at home."
The campus will depart from conventional institutional design. Rather than a high-rise complex, Pratt revealed nine single-story buildings modeled after village huts, each intended to tell a distinct chapter of the broader story of women's leadership. The facility will house exhibitions on Sirleaf and other global women leaders, conference and meeting spaces, administrative offices and a presidential library expected to hold writings by women across Africa and beyond.
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Pratt framed the project explicitly as a generational test, not merely a tribute to Sirleaf's legacy but a measure of whether Liberia's current women leaders can deliver on the vision she established.
"Legacy is not enough, it is a start," she said. "We cannot benefit from what she built and fail to deliver on the vision."
She described the campus as more than infrastructure, calling it a living ecosystem for collaboration, reflection and strategy.
"This is a place where women can come, gather, breathe, and spend time together in their own home," she said.
Journalists at the engagement pressed Pratt on access to funding for women leaders, a persistent challenge across Liberia and the continent. She clarified that the Center does not provide direct financial support but plays a strategic role in connecting women to networks and opportunities that can bridge that gap.
"We are not a funding institution," she said. "But we connect women to networks, opportunities, and people who can provide that access."
With programs already engaging dozens of women leaders across Africa, the Center is betting on influence over direct financing, leveraging networks rather than writing checks. Pratt said Liberia has a singular opportunity to host what she described as the first presidential center of its kind led by a woman.
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"This is not something in the future, it is happening now, right here in Monrovia," she said.
