Summary:

• A family in Monrovia was forced from their home because the landlord believed her five-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy, a disability caused by damage to the developing brain, was cursed.

• Liberia has laws and a government agency to protect people with disabilities, but they do not do outreach campaigns that would have alerted the mother to her rights and provide no services to thousands of families with children with severe disabilities.

• The National Commission on Disabilities says just US$210,000 is allocated to its public sector investment program. The Commission says it needs at least US$1 million to meet demand.

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives 

ELWA, Monrovia — Rachel cried as she packed her family’s meagre belongings. The rain from the sky matched the pain in her heart that early Sunday evening in June 2024. Rachel said her landlord had ordered her and her five children to leave. He called her daughter, who has cerebral palsy, a “dragon” and said children like her should not live in his house.

“It broke my heart and took tears from my eyes,” Rachel said. “Up to now, when I think about it, I can still cry.”

Rachel is one of thousands of parents of children with disabilities struggling to survive in Liberia, with a government that, experts say, has failed them. A previous New Narratives/FrontPage Africa investigation documented other families who said they had no government support, faced extreme discrimination and exclusion from schools.

Liberia has laws, a government disability commission and international commitments to protect people with disabilities. But in practice, the government does nothing. Its National Commission on Disabilities, the government agency tasked with assisting these families, does not know how many children have conditions such as cerebral palsy, a disability caused by damage to the developing brain, and profound autism. It has a small fraction of the funds it needs to meet demand. Most families do not even know a government agency exists.

The gaps come as the Human Rights Measurement Initiative released its latest global human rights data in June. The globally recognized measure assesses countries’ performance on economic, social, civil, and political rights. On “empowerment,” an assessment of how well the government is respecting rights, the country ranked “fair” but people with disabilities were ranked fourth most “at risk” of violations of their rights. 

Liberia’s 2022 census found more than half a million people aged five and older  – or about 11 percent of the population – had some level of functional disability. While there is no national data, in 2022 Unicef  estimated about 1 in 7 children in West Africa had moderate to severe disabilities.  

Doctors have expressed heartbreak and frustration at the number of babies they see with cerebral palsy in Liberia. Most cases are preventable and happen when the baby is deprived of oxygen during an emergency birth. Because many women avoid hospital because they do not have the funds to pay for it, and medical staff do not know the signs, there are a higher number of these injuries in Liberia than in countries with better functioning health systems. Rachel said this was exactly the case with her daughter. After a long labor the baby was rushed to hospital but it was too late. (New Narratives withholds the names of children in its reporting to protect them from stigma)

Advocates said that with support services children with severe disabilities and their families can see improvement in their quality of life.

Discrimination and stigma are illegal but there are no protections for families

The discrimination that Rachel and other families have suffered is illegal. Liberia has committed to protecting the rights of people with disabilities. The government established the National Commission on Disabilities under a 2005 law. It has also ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the country’s Children’s Law includes protections for children with disabilities.

But in practice laws are not enforced. Mohamed Sackor, program manager of the National Commission on Disabilities said lawyers advised the Commission it cannot prosecute someone solely on the basis of Liberia’s international treaty commitments without the relevant protections being incorporated into national law.

He said the Commission is working on proposed disability legislation that would strengthen protections, including requirements for schools to provide accessibility and accommodation for children with disabilities. That would need to go to the Legislature but lawmakers often need an active lobbying campaign to agree to such laws. No such campaign is happening now.

Meanwhile cases are widespread according to Urias Pour, executive director of Liberia’s Independent National Commission on Human Rights. He said its monitors have documented children with disabilities being called “dragons”, bullied in schools and having their complaints dismissed.

In one case, Pour said, a 12-year-old girl with a speech impairment went to police to report abuse by a relative. Officers gave her a biscuit and sent her home. “No one looked into the matter because they could not hear her,” Pour said.

Bowoulo Taylor Kelley, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, said responsibility cannot rest with the disability commission alone. She said ministries responsible for education, health, gender and justice need systems and funding that allow people with disabilities to exercise their rights.

“Fund and enforce disability rights as a legal obligation and not as charity,” Kelley said. “Our people are not beggars.”

Families also desperately need services to avoid poverty, illness and death

Rachel’s daughter turned five in August. She cannot walk or speak and depends on her mother for almost everything. But when her four siblings talk and play with her, she laughs.

The child’s father stopped supporting his daughter after members of his family called her a witch. Rachel once took him to police and a relative promised he would provide support, but she has received none. Rachel used to earn money washing other people’s clothes but she can no longer easily leave home because her daughter needs constant care. “I can’t turn my back on my child,” Rachel said.

“I carried her for nine months and I suffered, and I am still suffering for her,” said Rachel. “Sometimes I can lock myself up in the room and cry, cry, cry.”

Rachel said her daughter recently became seriously ill and was taken to hospital because Rachel was not able to feed her. The girl will only eat Cream of Wheat mixed with peanut butter. But a small packet of peanut butter costs L$180. When she could not afford it, Rachel softened rice and tried to feed it to her. Her daughter refused to eat.

Rachel said she pawned the deed to her property to a shopkeeper to get a US$5 pack of diapers after the shopkeeper refused to give them to her on credit. Rachel is now starving herself.

“So for that reason my daughter’s body is dropping and it’s hurting me,” Rachel said. “I can’t see my daughter in that condition where she has not eaten and then I take food to eat.”

She wants help starting a small business she can operate from home. The family lives in a makeshift house, and Rachel said she also needs money to repair its floor. Her other four children are also suffering from the financial challenges brought on by her situation.

Government doesn’t know how many children need help 

Sackor said the lack of data on how many children in Liberia have severe disabilities makes it harder for the Commission to identify people who need help and plan services for them. But even if it had the funds, it could not do much.

The Commission has a budget of US$573,00 of which US$210,000 is allocated for its public sector investment program across the entire country. Sackor said it provides educational and technical-vocational assistance and is currently supporting about 150 people in various ways.

“There is a huge pressure on the Commission currently to accommodate more people,” Sackor said.

Sackor said the Commission needs at least a million a year and is hoping the Boakai administration – that recently trumpeted an increase in revenue to more than $1 billion – will agree to an increase in the Commission’s budget next year.

The Commission is working with international partners to improve screening and data collection, including for people with cerebral palsy and profound autism, a severe developmental condition that usually leaves children without language and with limited control of emotions, and requiring constant care.

But there is no coordination of the services that do exist. JFK Medical Center operates a pediatric neurology clinic that treats children with neurological conditions including cerebral palsy. Sackor told FrontPage Africa/New Narratives it did not know about the clinic but would follow up.

For now, Rachel and thousands of other families like hers are battling to survive day by day, afraid for their children and for themselves.

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project.

Summary:

• A global study found nearly three in every four workers in Sub-Saharan Africa are “struggling,” not “thriving.” In Liberia, that struggle is visible in classrooms and clinics where public servants work through low pay, stress, and poor conditions.
• Teachers and midwives interviewed for this story described low take-home pay, delayed payroll placement, overcrowded classrooms, understaffed clinics, and salary bureaucracy that leaves many exhausted and others walking away.
• Economists and labor advocates warn the cost hurts everyone: weak classrooms and clinics mean weaker learning, poorer health, lower productivity, and a future workforce Liberia may not be preparing.

By Tetee Gebro and Joyclyn Wea, health and gender correspondents with New Narratives

BENSONVILLE, Montserrado County – Before sunrise, Elaine Duowai prepares lesson notes in a house where electricity is not reliable. By morning, she is walking to Euphemia Barclay Elementary School, where some pupils are already missing from the rows of benches before the day begins.

Some stay home because families cannot afford transport, food, or school materials. Others are sent to help parents sell or work on nearby farms. Duowai teaches the children who come. She worries about the ones who do not.

“Sometimes I look at the empty benches and feel weak,” Duowai said. “The children are not lazy. Their families are just struggling.”

The work is also hard inside the classroom: too few materials, absent pupils, children carrying adult burdens, and teachers expected to supply patience when the system supplies little else.

Then there is the pay. After one trip to central Monrovia to correct a salary problem, Duowai said she was told she needed money she did not have to open a new bank account. She returned to school with the problem unresolved and her strength nearly gone. Her husband, also a teacher, died in 2024. She is still fighting bureaucracy to access his benefits. She makes soap at night to feed her family and then gets up at sunrise to begin the school day.

Hers is the face of a wider warning for Liberia. In the latest State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report produced by U.S. based polling company Gallup, nearly three in every four workers in Sub-Saharan Africa are “struggling” rather than “thriving.” The annual employee study, based on more than 141,000 employed respondents worldwide, also found high daily stress across the region.

In Liberia, that finding shows up in public schools and clinics where workers continue to report for duty while low pay, delayed payroll placement, crowded facilities and weak systems drain the very people expected to keep the country moving. Interviews with teachers, midwives and economists describe a labor crisis that is not only about salaries, but about morale, working conditions and the cost of asking essential workers to survive on purpose alone. Especially when the country’s lawmakers take home as much as $US15,000 a month, more than most lawmakers in wealthy countries.

Duowai is clear about why the issue matters: the classroom is where Liberia’s future nurses, doctors, accountants, farmers, engineers and public officials begin. If the government forgets the classroom, she said, it forgets the people who will one day run the country.

Mary W. Mulbah-Nyumah, president of the National Teachers Association of Liberia, said the Gallup finding sounds familiar. She says low pay and repeated administrative frustration are weakening teachers before they even reach the classroom.

Nyumah taught in Liberia’s public school system for two decades before leading the association. She remembers years when teachers received salaries only twice a year, and only for one month at a time. She survived by trading, relying on food support and taking extra work. She says that old pattern has not fully ended; it has only changed form.

Today, some teachers still wait years to be placed on the payroll. Others are paid but say what reaches them after deductions cannot cover transport, rent, food, children’s needs and the small classroom expenses they often absorb themselves. In schools with too few books, desks or teaching materials, the emotional cost builds alongside the financial one.

Nyumah said the country is relying on teachers’ sacrifice to keep schools open. If too many leave, children lose more than lessons. They lose time, preparation, and the chance to move into adulthood with the skills needed to escape the poverty their parents are fighting.

Public-sector pay in Liberia has long lagged the cost of living. Successive governments have promised to address the problem. The Boakai administration has pointed to payroll verification, a promised $US150 gross monthly salary floor, and civil-service testing as steps toward cleaning up the payroll and reducing “no-show” jobs awarded in corrupt deals. Some of that is happening.

The Civil Service Agency said it integrated 3,406 essential workers in education, MCSS, and health into the national payroll in 2025, including 2,148 teachers and technical workers and 1,050 health workers. But the government’s own 2025 budget said fully absorbing all volunteer workers would cost about $US15 million, far more than the $US2.6 million allocated that year to begin the process.

Nearly two years into the administration, workers interviewed for this story said the reform is still uneven.

Maxim Bleeten and Augustus Walker, public relations officers at the ministries of education and health, did not respond to requests for comment by the deadline.

Jerry Barclay, assistant coordinator and instructor in the Department of Economics at the University of Liberia, said wages are among the strongest signals a government sends to its workforce. When workers are underpaid, unpaid or emotionally exhausted, he said, absenteeism rises, errors increase, service quality falls and productivity declines.

A weak health sector means sick workers may not recover quickly enough to return to farms, offices or classrooms. A weak education sector sends less-prepared students into the labor force. When schools and clinics struggle, Barclay says, agriculture, finance and other parts of the economy eventually feel it.

At Johnsonville Public Clinic, Larwuo B. Walker, a registered nurse and midwife, sees the same pressure from the health side. Six midwives cover shifts that stretch from morning into night for a community of thousands. On some nights, she says, midwives sleep in chairs because there are not enough people to cover the work. Some women arrive in critical condition after delaying care because they were afraid or could not afford to come. Unnecessary birth injuries to mothers and babies that result in lifelong hardships often follow.

Walker holds a Bachelor of Science in Midwifery, but her monthly take-home pay is less than $US200. She has stayed in the clinic because she knows she is often all the stands between patients’ life and death.

Barclay said that is the breaking point policymakers often miss. Purpose can keep people in service for a time, but it cannot pay transport fare, rent, school fees or market prices. When a worker’s income stays fixed while prices rise – as they are now – living standards fall. Eventually, he says, productivity falls too.

Barclay said Liberia should treat spending on teachers and health workers as an economic investment, not only a social cost. If the government says it cannot afford better support for them, he said, it should also count the cost of weak schools, exhausted clinics and skilled workers leaving essential sectors for jobs that offer more dignity.

Nyumah said the teachers’ association will keep pushing salary complaints, payroll delays and volunteer-teacher cases to the ministries. Until then, teacher Douwai will prepare soap at night, wake before daylight, and walk back to school where her students, and the country’s future, depend on her.

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.

Summary

• The health ministry has launched a monthly National Exercise and Wellness Day as the country confronts rising risks from hypertension, diabetes, obesity and other chronic or “noncommunicable” diseases.
• A national health survey found nearly one in four adults had raised blood pressure, while six in ten were overweight obese, putting them at heightened risk. Few of those with raised blood pressure are taking medication.
• Health officials are urging Liberians to make physical activity, healthier eating and regular health checks part of their everyday lives.

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

CATHOLIC JUNCTION, Monrovia – Rain was falling Saturday morning when Nadia S. Jolo joined a group of people walking from through Monrovia’s streets as part of the country’s first National Exercise and Wellness Day.

For the 51-year-old, getting wet was not enough to turn her back. Just days earlier, Jolo had watched a colleague at work collapse from a stroke. Jolo has hypertension herself. The incident frightened her. So when Jolo, who works with the Ministry of Health’s Malaria Division, heard about Saturday’s walk, she decided to join.

 “I need to exercise. I need to reduce my diet,” Jolo said. 

Jolo is among a growing number of Liberians confronting noncommunicable diseases such as hypertension, stroke and diabetes – illnesses that can develop without obvious symptoms and lead to strokes, heart disease and other illnesses, and premature death. Liberians’ vulnerability was documented in a FrontPage Africa/New Narratives series last year. They are called chronic or “lifestyle” diseases because they are mostly caused by lifestyle decisions – a diet heavy in sugar, processed foods and fat – lack of exercise and sleep, smoking and too much stress. NCDs are now the second most common cause of death in Sub Saharan Africa.

Liberia’s 2022 STEPS survey, — a nationwide World Health Organization-supported survey that measures NCDs and their risk factors among adults — found nearly one in four adults aged 18 to 69 had raised blood pressure and almost six in ten were overweight or obese, putting them in the danger zone. More than eight in ten people found with raised blood pressure were not taking medication for it meaning they were at great risk of developing a chronic disease. 

The growing burden has prompted President Joseph Boakai to declare the last Saturday of every month National Exercise and Wellness Day, part of a government effort to encourage physical activity and prevent noncommunicable diseases. Six to eight a.m. on the last Saturday of every month will be reserved for the nationwide observance. It calls on government institutions, businesses, schools and communities to participate in activities including walking, jogging, cycling, stretching, health education and screenings.

“This helps the Ministry of Health to be able to reinforce the issue of physical activity because it helps to minimize those risks,” said Jamesetta Smith, director of the Ministry’s Noncommunicable Diseases and Injury Unit.

Saturday’s inaugural event was a 4.7 kilometer walk from Catholic Junction on Tubman Boulevard to the Ministry of Health off SKD Boulevard in Congo Town. 

Regular physical activity can help prevent and manage NCDs including heart disease and diabetes and can lower the risk of developing hypertension. Health experts also recommend healthier diets, avoiding tobacco and harmful alcohol use, and regular screening for conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes.

“Most people think you have to go to the supermarket and buy something expensive, but we have potato greens, cassava leaves, we have our palava sauce, our okra,” Smith said.

The Ministry is also urging Liberians to regularly check their blood pressure and blood sugar so that people with abnormal readings can be identified early and referred to health facilities for treatment. And they’re also urging them to make exercise a daily thing.

“We want to enforce it beyond just that one day,” Smith said. “We want to make it as part of our lifestyle and culture in our country.”

The Ministry plans to work with other government agencies and institutions to develop their own exercise routines rather than create a separate government-run exercise program. Institutions can choose their own days for regular physical activity. The initiative is also intended to extend across all 15 counties.

For some participants at Saturday’s event, fitting exercise in has been challenging. Jolo had not exercised regularly in two years. When she was diagnosed with hypertension, her doctor told her to exercise regularly, eat healthier and stop drinking alcohol. She stopped drinking, but her busy work schedule got in the way of her exercising. She says this walk gave her the encouragement she needed to reset.

Ansumana Morris, a 61-year-old retired employee of the Liberia Petroleum Refining Company, said a doctor previously told him that his cholesterol was high and advised him to watch his diet and exercise. But Morris admits that he has struggled to exercise. Morris blamed his own “laziness”. “I’ve not been regular,” he said. “Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t.”

He said the new national exercise day could give people like him another reason to get moving. He plans to return for the next event.

Dr. Olushayo Olu, the World Health Organization representative to Liberia, said noncommunicable diseases are increasing in Liberia, as they are in other African countries. One of the dangers, he said, is that people can live with hypertension without realizing it.

“If you have high blood pressure, you don’t know,” Olu said in an interview with New Narratives after participating in Saturday’s walk. “You are fine, you are okay, until you get a problem.”

“Liberians should not only make it a monthly thing,” Olu said. “They can put their exercise regime into their daily life.”

Smith acknowledged that public awareness of noncommunicable diseases remains limited and that funding to address them is inadequate. She said health donors – which have funded more than 50 percent of Liberia’s health care until last year’s cuts – have traditionally directed support toward communicable diseases that need heavy medical intervention including malaria, HIV and tuberculosis. Those donors expect government to take on more of the burden of their own healthcare starting with education.

“It’s now time for our donor community, our government to shift our attention and support to NCDs,” Smith said.

Smith said about 63 health facilities supported by the World Diabetes Foundation are providing free diabetes services and treatment. Government health facilities also provide services for hypertension and diabetes, she said. Some services charge minimal fees intended to help facilities maintain supplies.

The Ministry is also encouraging communities and businesses to organize their own exercise events to serve as an opportunity for early detection. People found with abnormal blood pressure or blood sugar readings can be referred to health facilities. 

For Rosetta Stubblefield, 70, the message about exercise was familiar.

Stubblefield travelled from ELWA Junction to join Saturday’s walk despite the rain. She also has hypertension. She used to exercise but had stopped. After hearing about the government’s exercise day on the radio Friday, she decided to come out.

“You don’t have to have symptoms or be diagnosed,” Stubblefield said. “Your body needs to move.”

For Jolo, however, the warning was more immediate. This time, she said, she knows exercise must be a priority.

“I will join the march every last Saturday,” Jolo said. “And even at my house, I will be doing it in my yard.”

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives.

Summary

• A coalition of African civil society leaders are pushing donors to give African organizations and communities more control over development money as traditional foreign aid shrinks. They are also looking to Africans to raise more funds themselves and restrain corrupt money flowing out of the continent.
• A growing number of African organizations are rejecting funding agreements that they say do not match their needs. 
• Leaders say shifting control to African institutions will only work if those institutions are also accountable to the communities the money is meant to help.

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

ACCRA, Ghana — When a donor offered money to an organization working in Kenya, it came with an opportunity to expand its work into more communities. For a small organization that needed funding, it might have seemed like an easy decision. It wasn’t.

The donor wanted the organization to expand quickly. The organization said the communities it was already working with needed deeper support before it moved elsewhere. So they made a tough decision.

“They respectfully denied the funding,” said Nafissatou Sene, senior manager of Portfolio Services at African Collaborative, an organization that raises money and funds for African groups working in health, education, gender justice, agriculture and livelihoods.

Sene declined to identify the Kenyan organization because she did not have permission to name it. She said its budget was small and it needed money, making the decision especially difficult, but in the end it decided it had no choice.

“We’re not going to take anything just because it comes our way,” Sene said of the organization’s position.

That kind of decision-making is what Nana Asantewa Afadzinu, executive director of the West Africa Civil Society Institute, said has too often been missing from development in Africa.

“For too long we’ve had development done to us,” Afadzinu said. “We’ve not been in the driving seats of deciding what the solutions should be to our own problems and resourcing them.”

The story has become an example of the kind of power a grouping of African civil society organizations gathered here for the first-ever meeting of African civil society leaders, say they want: the ability to decide what their communities need and insist that donors adjust their requirements to match the communities’ priorities rather than their own.

The three-day conference “Africa at the Centre: Leading Change, Shifting Power” brought together more than 200 civil society leaders, funders, policymakers and development experts from 30 countries, including Liberia. Organizers said decades of development assistance have left foreign donors with too much control over which African problems receive money, how projects are designed and how success is measured. They say this has led to failed projects, lack of accountability, talent diverted from entrepreneurship and job creation, dependency and corruption.  

Now, as traditional foreign aid from rich countries shrinks, they are pushing for African organizations and communities to have greater control over development spending by demanding donors listen. But they are also looking to raise more funds from Africans and African governments, and to limit the amount of money that flows out of the continent in corruption and debt payments.

But some at the conference said their proposed solution raises another difficult question: if foreign donors give up power, who in Africa gets it? African governments and civil society organizations have their own problems with corruption, weak accountability and failure to listen to communities. Moving control of development money from foreign institutions to African ones will not necessarily put that power in the hands of the people the money is supposed to help.

One Liberian at the conference, Edwin Mends-Cole, said he knows how difficult the first part of that equation can be. Mends-Cole, executive director of Youth Climate Change Initiative Liberia, said small civil society organizations often depend on donor projects to survive. Funding opportunities can be so scarce that organizations adapt what they do to what donors are willing to finance.

“It is hard to say realistically ‘I will not accept,’” Mends-Cole said.

Liberia’s dependence on foreign assistance extends far beyond civil society. World Bank data shows the country received about $563 million in net official development assistance and official aid in 2023, equivalent to two thirds of the national budget. A separate World Bank assessment found official development assistance averaged about 12 percent of Liberia’s gross domestic product between 2022 and 2024.

The limited income of the national government has meant major public services have been left to donors. Donor aid funds at least 50 percent of Liberia’s health sector, for example. But stories of corruption and mismanagement abound, and the government is no closer to standing on its own.

Mends-Cole agrees that donors need to better listen. He said he has seen what can happen when a local organization is able to challenge the way a donor wants to solve a problem.

In 2023, his organization worked on a project under the United Nations Development Programme’s Small Grants Programme to protect biodiversity and mangroves in the Mesurado wetlands. Mends-Cole said the proposed approach focused on educating communities about the need to stop destroying mangroves.

But some people were cutting the mangroves because they depended on them to make a living. Telling them about environmental protection without giving them another way to earn money would not stop the cutting, Mends-Cole said.

“We are on the ground,” he recalled telling the funder. “This approach will not work.” After discussions, he said, the project was changed to include alternative livelihoods.

Mends-Cole said local organizations demanding more power from donors must therefore be prepared to give communities more power too. Before designing a project, he said, organizations should first ask people what problem they need solved. They must be transparent and report to communities on how the funds are spent and results obtained, as well as donors. 

West African Civil Society Institute’s Afadzinu said changing the system does not mean simply replacing foreign money. It also means changing who decides how that money is used. She said she wanted to see donors provide more flexible and core funding that allows African organizations to strengthen themselves instead of moving from one donor-designed project to another.

“Don’t help us to continuously depend on you,” Afadzinu said. “Help us to become stronger.”

African countries and organizations must also raise more of their own money, she said, including through local philanthropy, diaspora support, businesses and social enterprises.

Sene said African organizations may already have more power in their relationship with donors than they realize. One organization refusing money may have little influence, she said. Many organizations taking the same position could force donors to listen.

“We cannot give grants or funds to people who refuse to take it from us,” Sene said. “If everybody said no, what are we going to do with the money?”

She acknowledged that completely ending African civil society’s dependence on foreign funding is not realistic in the near future. The immediate goal, she said, should be changing the relationship.

At least one international funder at the Accra gathering is already onboard.  

Tendisai Chigwedere of the U.S.-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which was a financial backer of the Convening, said philanthropy has historically held enormous influence because it controlled the money. She said Hewlett is listening to local organizations, giving them more control with long-term partnerships and flexible funding. The Hewlett Foundation said it awarded $631 million in grants in 2024, with nearly three-quarters provided as flexible funding.

“We don’t want you to be boxed into a project,” Chigwedere said. “Allowing you to have general operating support helps you build the institution, build the vision, and work on the agenda… to do the things you need to do.”

Changing how existing donors give money is only one proposal being discussed.

Wanjiru Kanyiha, network coordinator of the Global Public Investment Network, is pushing a model in which African countries would contribute to a common pool according to their ability and participate in deciding how the money is spent. The idea is summed up in three phrases: all contribute, all benefit, all decide.

Under such a system, Kanyiha said, a poorer country such as Liberia would not be expected to contribute as much as a wealthy country but would still have a voice in decisions and could receive more than it contributed based on need.

The model remains a proposal. It has not yet proved that it can replace or significantly reshape the current aid system. Supporters hope to have governments working around one or two pilots by the end of 2028. 

After three days in Accra, the West African Civil Society Institute said it will temporarily steward the work after the meeting, coordinate follow-up and help participants continue developing ideas that emerged from the gathering.

In a post-convening reflection, Charles Vandyck, the Institute’s head of capacity development, acknowledged that transferring power from international organizations to African institutions alone would not transform development.

“Redistributing power is not about reversing hierarchies,” Vandyck wrote. “It is about building systems where power is shared, accountability is mutual, and agency is respected.”

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives.

Summary:

• 200 civil society leaders, funders, policymakers and others from almost 30 countries will gather in Ghana this week to design a new African-led approach to development.  
• They say the existing model, designed by non-Africans in capitals of Europe and America, has failed to understand the communities where they work, fueling dependence, and failing to deliver lasting impact.
• The debate has particular significance for Liberia, where critics say billions of dollars of development aid has fueled corruption and dependency and had limited impact.

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

In the four years to 2023 the European Union spent $16 million to boost the systems that would keep Liberians safe from gender-based violence. But in 2026 FrontPage Africa/New Narratives found a completely broken legal system in which victims had little chance of accessing justice. The head of the sexual and gender-based violence unit conceded just two perpetrators had been convicted in six years.

The outcome came as little surprise to a growing movement of people in the development sector. They have condemned an aid system designed largely in Western capitals and where the people who understand a problem best are rarely the people trusted to define it.

A major conference in Accra this week will bring together more than 200 African civil society organizations, including from Liberia, with plans to change that. Organizers say the answer is not simply more foreign aid. They want Africans themselves—from governments to communities—to have greater power to determine development priorities and how money is used.

“Let’s shift away from those of us who want to control communities to a situation where communities are in the driving seat,” said Charles Kojo Vandyck, of the West Africa Civil Society Institute, organizers of the Africa at the Center convening, in an interview.

The idea for the Convening grew out of a WACSI project called RINGO — Reimagining the INGO — launched in 2021. More than 95 civil society leaders, funders and organizations were given one instruction: stop writing reports about what is broken and build something that works instead.

Jimm Chick Fomunjong and Gideon Ahenkorah of the West Africa Civil Society Institute, WACSI, described the assumption buried inside that system in a soon to be released opinion piece.

“The form is only the smallest expression of a much larger architecture: who controls resources, who sets the terms on which they move, and who gets to decide what counts as a legitimate priority,” the pair write. “The scale of what these prototypes are responding to is difficult to overstate, and African institutions have spent years documenting it themselves.

Africa received $74 billion in official aid in 2023. In the same year, according to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the continent lost an estimated $90 billion to illicit financial flows, largely through trade mis-invoicing and tax avoidance. It paid a further $103 billion servicing external debt in 2024. 

At the International Monetary Fund, where decisions of consequence require an 85 percent majority, the 46 nations of sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a combined economy larger than India’s, shared just two seats on the 24 member executive board until 2024. A third was added only after a decade of advocacy. Africa’s collective vote today stands at roughly 5 per cent. None of these figures, taken together, simply describe a system that malfunctioned. They point instead to an architecture in which the rules governing money, risk and decision-making have too often been set elsewhere, with African countries carrying consequences without possessing an equivalent share of power over the system itself.” 

Organizers want the Accra gathering to advance three broad goals: an African-led development financing system, development in which communities are in the driving seat, and stronger institutions that work for Africa. The conference will also showcase practical approaches already being tested rather than simply producing speeches about problems in the existing system.

One model already being tested is what the organization calls a “reverse call for proposals.” Traditionally, donors determine what they want to fund, issue a call for proposals and African organizations compete for the money. Under the reverse model, communities identify their own development priorities, develop proposals and then invite donors to apply to support them.

The approach has already been tested in the Nyankanga community in Zambia. Working with the Zambian Governance Foundation, community members identified their own development priorities and issued a proposal. Potential partners applied and the community assessed the applications and selected Plan International Zambia.

When Plan arrived with its normal due-diligence requirements, Vandyck said the community turned the process around. Community members first asked Plan to provide its annual reports, explain where it had previously invested in Zambia and demonstrate that it would remain committed to the community.

“You do not send the call, we send the call,” the community told Plan, according to Vandyck.

The amount involved, about $17,000, was small. But Fomunjong and Ahenkorah wrote that the reversal it represents is much bigger than the dollar figure suggests. The Zambian Governance Foundation has since repeated the process in nine more communities. Groups in Malawi and Ghana are testing early versions of the same approach.

Critics of existing aid model say Liberia has more to gain from a new approach than most

In Liberia the failure of the existing development model has been acute. Critics say billions of dollars spent in the country since 2003 has little to show for it with half the population in poverty and extreme poverty rising.

Wonderful Logan is on the frontline. In 2022 she heard good news that free mosquito nets were being handed out across Liberia. The Ministry of Health had received millions in funding from the $5 billion annual donor pool known as the Global Fund to supply nets to people in five counties. So she waited for her net.

“I didn’t receive any,” Logan said. “I got children, I got grandchildren.”

She ended up spending her own money to buy a net instead. Since then, she has watched some of the nets that were supposed to protect families end up somewhere else entirely — used for fishing, draped over chicken coops, or cut into pieces and sold in the market.

“I don’t really see mosquito nets in people’s houses,” Logan said. “I see it in the marketplaces.”

Nets, medicines and other supplies that are meant to be free are routinely stolen and reappear in markets to be bought by the very people they were intended for. Even if they are not stolen, Logan says most of her friends don’t believe the nets work to prevent malaria. Some believe misinformation that they constrain their spirits from leaving their bodies while they sleep.It’s difficult to trust data showing malaria incidence has decreased in Liberia. The 2022 Malaria Indicator Survey found that half the population had access to an insecticide-treated net in their household. Half of children under five and 53 percent of pregnant women — the people malaria threatens most — slept under a net the night before the survey.

But a 2022 investigation by its Office of the Inspector General found systemic fraud. Investigators found problems with 91 percent of expenditures reviewed, totaling $1.1 million – citing fraudulent vehicle contracts, inflated bills and almost no internal controls. For 75 percent of field activities checked, they couldn’t confirm programs had even happened. The Malaria Indicator Survey was one of the activities undertaken with Fund money.

It is exactly the kind of failure Charles Kojo Vandyck, WACSI’s head of capacity building, says has to end on both sides. Secretive decision making without clear explanations, reporting and community buy-in leaves communities powerless to hold leaders accountable.

“There’s very little attention on when the funds are disbursed and where the funds actually go,” Vandyck said.

Vandyck says that African ownership and greater transparency with populations will ensure greater accountability. He said citizens and civil society organizations must follow public money and hold governments accountable for how it is actually spent. The Africa at the Centre gathering comes at a pivotal moment. Foreign aid is being cut while African governments and civil society organizations are increasingly questioning a decades-old development model. Ghana turned down a new health funding agreement with the US Trump administration this year after officials decided the data-sharing terms it demanded cost more than the funding was worth. Zimbabwe had already rejected a similar deal. Kenya’s version of the same fight is now in its own courts.

Organizers of the Accra conference, running from September 1 to 3, say the gathering will produce a formal commitment to build what they call an African-owned architecture for development — one with African priorities, African resources and African agency at its center.

This story was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project.

Summary

• A woman died in May after botched surgery at Stockton Creek Health Center in Caldwell, where a man posing as a doctor but with no medical qualifications operated on her.
• The Liberia Medical and Dental Council, the government agency tasked with overseeing medical practitioners in the country, said it had asked the man to provide a medical license in 2022 but did not stop him practicing when he did not supply it.  
• Former solicitor general Tiawan Gongloe and Joseph Somwarbi, former chair of House committee on health, said the case shows that the government agency has been “derelict” in its duty, leaving all Liberians at risk.

By Tetee Gebro, health and gender correspondent with New Narratives

CALDWELL, Monrovia — Saybah Kollie collapsed on a Sunday morning in early April, two days after her son’s second birthday.

Her husband, Blama Kamara, and the community chairman rushed her to the closest clinic. Over the next few weeks, Saybah’s family said, she suffered at the hands of a fake doctor who claimed he was qualified to operate and heal her, but who was in fact, a fraud preying on desperate families like hers.

“The only thing I wanted was to see her survive,” says Kamara. The supposed doctor, Mohamed Ali Bah, warned him Saybah would die if he waited. “He said I should not take a risk with her life. So I trusted him.”

Forty-seven days later, Saybah was dead.

Saybah had become the latest in an unknown number of people to die in Liberia at the hands of fake medical personnel. The Liberian Medical and Dental Council, tasked with licensing health practitioners and facilities in the country, does not keep track of how many people die or suffer injuries as a result of medical treatments by unlicensed individuals, but regular posts on social media show Saybah’s case is not isolated.

With a barely functioning health care system with just one doctor for every 10,0000 people (the World Health Organization recommends one for every 1,000) and half the population living in poverty, Liberia has become an easy place for dishonest people to take advantage of their fellow citizens.

But experts say the problem is compounded by the complete failure of the Liberian Medical and Dental Council to check licenses and shut down those impersonating as doctors. That is leaving Liberians across the country vulnerable.

“This showed that the LMDC’s oversight and regulatory enforcement capacity is very weak, especially in this case where they are saying that the individual… has been practicing without a license for years while they [the Council] are being paid with taxpayers’ money,” said Joseph Somwarbi, former chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Health.

Surgery Ordered Based Only on “Pressing the Stomach”

When Saybah first arrived at Stockton Creek, the family was introduced to “Doctor Bah”. Her sister, Janga Kollie, who came later, was worried from the start.

“They didn’t run any tests,” Janga said. “If they do a test, at least they will tell us something. But the man only used his hand to press her stomach, and he said she had a fibroid.”

A fibroid is a non-cancerous growth in the womb that is more common in African women. To identify fibroids and rule out other causes, doctors would use an ultrasound machine or test her blood in a laboratory. Pressing someone’s stomach with your hand is a guess.

Before Saybah could even be examined, Kamara was asked to pay US$20. “Doctor” Bah said Saybah had lost so much blood she needed seven pints replaced at a cost of US$50 a pint. Within a week the bill for the accommodation and treatment reached US$330.

Saybah seemed to improve so Kamara took her home. But then she collapsed again.

This time Bah said she needed surgery. He claimed he was a surgeon at JFK Hospital and a professor at a major medical school in Monrovia. Kamara asked whether the clinic had an ultrasound machine — a device doctors use to see inside the body without surgery. “He said he had everything,” Kamara recalled. “He said this place is almost like a hospital.” He convinced Kamara. “Bah really got sweet mouth,” said Janga. Saybah’s brother was called to sign a form agreeing to the surgery. The operation happened quickly — Kamara only learned it was finished when he arrived that evening and found her in recovery.

The Bleeding That Would Not Stop

After the surgery, the bleeding got worse. Every day and night the clinic called saying she needed more blood — more than fifteen pints in total, US$750, paid straight to Bah in cash. “He said it will not stop right away. It will take time,” said Janga.

But Saybah grew weaker and afraid. She began begging to be moved to another hospital. Bah refused, telling her he could treat her. Finally Saybah’s ex-husband, calling from abroad, insisted the family take her to 14 Military Hospital. Bah refused to write a referral note. Instead, he handed the family a blank paper. “Since you people want to carry the girl, if you carry her, my hand is not inside. You people just make paper,” Janga recalled him saying. At 14 Military Hospital, doctors, clearly worried, asked where Saybah’s surgery had been done. They asked her directly — “Is he a licensed doctor?” They told the family they did not have the right kind of doctor for what had been done and referred her to JFK. At JFK, doctors called Bah and asked what tests he had run before operating. According to Janga, the call cut off. She tried calling back. Bah did not answer.

A Deadly Disease, Discovered Too Late

JFK doctors revealed a diagnosis the family had never heard: cervical cancer. Dr. Avee Kamah told the family Saybah came to them too late.  “She said they tried their best,” Janga said. But it was up to God to save her.  

A day later, Saybah died. The death certificate said her cancer caused her kidneys to fail and her blood to become severely depleted. Fluid built up in her lungs and toxins built up in her brain — this combination killed her.

James-Emmanuel D. Cole Jr., JFK’s communications director, confirmed in a statement that Saybah was received as a serious medical emergency following a referral from 14 Military Hospital, and that she died despite the efforts of the clinical team.

The hospital declined to say whether its doctors believed the original surgery at Stockton Creek contributed to her death or whether JFK reported concerns about Stockton Creek to the Medical and Dental Council or any other authority.

But Cole wrote that the hospital would cooperate fully with any competent regulatory, investigative, or judicial authority that requested access to Saybah’s records. He also noted that cases involving severe complications “may be reviewed by the relevant authorities, including the Liberia Medical and Dental Council.”

“There Was A Foul Play Somewhere”

After Saybah’s funeral, Bah called Kamara to give his sympathies. Kamara hung up on him. But Bah called again, after a reporter working on this story visited his clinic, to ask Kamara why he was speaking to journalists. Kamara ended the call again.

After numerous requests Bah agreed to an interview with FrontPage Africa/New Narratives. He refused to allow his comments to go on the record. But he did deny that Saybah had been treated at his clinic.

Kamara has Saybah’s patient card from Stockton Creek, dated April 5, 2026. He and Janga said they visited her there. They said more than ten people, including members of Saybah’s church, can confirm she was treated there.

“That statement alone makes me know there was a foul play,” Kamara said. “Why are you refusing that Saybah was at your hospital and you did the operation? For that I can’t keep silent. If I keep silent I will not be fair to Saybah.”

The Liberia Medical and Dental Council repeatedly misses opportunities to stop fake doctor

But experts say Bah is not the only one complicit in Saybah’s suffering. The Liberia Medical and Dental Council, tasked by government with regular medical practitioners in the country, repeatedly failed to do its job.

The Council’s credential committee first asked Bah to supply his license in 2022 according to Joseph Colmah, the LMDC’s Medical and Research Director. Bah never did and the Council did nothing to stop him practicing.

In 2024, Stockton Creek, having got away with not complying with the Council’s requests for two years, became bold. They asked the Council for permission to upgrade from a basic clinic to a full health center — a higher level of facility with stricter requirements for staff, equipment, and record-keeping. Even though Bah had never supplied a medical license, the Council began to process the application. It told the clinic to pause all patient care until inspectors could confirm it met the standard. But the inspectors never returned and the clinic kept seeing patients for another two years.

It was only this May— one week after Saybah died and the family began posting on Facebook – that the Council shut the clinic down, four years and an unknown number of deaths and injuries, after the Council was first alerted to Bah’s deception. In a press release the Council said it “remains committed to ensuring quality, safe, and professional healthcare delivery throughout the country and will continue its nationwide regulatory assessment across Liberia’s fifteen counties over the next one month.”

The Council did not report the case to the police.

But when a reporter visited the clinic three weeks later, in June, asking for medical help, the clinic was still operating. The reporter was given treatment and charged L$1000 and saw a man identified as “Dr. Bah” on the premises.

In July, after questions from this reporter, the Council published a list of 532 licensed doctors in Liberia, for the first time. (New Narratives has published the list at this link.) The registry includes an active license for “Dr. Bah Mohammed Aliou,” license number NL/636, valid from January 17, 2026 to January 16, 2027. A source familiar with the matter told New Narratives that the person listed is the same Mohammed Ali Bah at Stockton Creek. The Council did not respond to questions asking whether the two names refer to the same person.

Liberia Medical and Dental Council denies responsibility for policing fake doctors

In a surprising revelation, Colmah said it was not the Council’s role to check whether Bah had continued to practice without accreditation. He said the Council can only pursue charges against someone for falsely calling themselves a doctor with written proof — like a prescription or medical record signed using the title “doctor.” Patient testimony that they were treated by someone using that title is not enough.

Colmah said the Council has no power to physically lock a building — only a court can do that. The Council can only post a notice and ask the facility to stop. Colmah claimed the Council had posted a notice on the facility in 2024. “But as you might be aware, maybe renovation, someone may get to it.”

But experts said that Colmah’s statement was wrong.

Joseph Somwarbi, pharmacologist, former representative for Nimba county and chair of the House of Representatives Committee on Health, said it is the Council’s duty to ensure that all medical clinics, health centers, and hospitals are licensed and demand that all licensed practitioners and facilities place their licenses in visible locations. And they must work with the Liberia National Police to shut down illegal operations and refer unlicensed practitioners for criminal prosecution.

He said those at the Council found responsible for failure to act should be replaced.

Tiawan Gongloe, former solicitor general, agreed. He demanded the Liberian National Police explore criminal charges Bah. “What he did is almost like shooting somebody with a gun, because he is not authorized to practice medicine.”

Gongloe said the Council also bears responsibility and the family could bring a lawsuit.

“The LMDC takes some responsibility by not closing [the clinic]. They were derelict in their action.” Gongloe urged the Council to act now. “LMDC should stop him. He is a menace. Every second that that man is operating, Liberians are at risk.”

Kamara is now the sole carer for their two young children who cry for their mother. He strains to understand how authorities could have left his family so unprotected.

“If a man like that is not a doctor, and his place is still operating at a time like this,” Kamara said, “My mouth is full. I don’t know.”

Nemenlah Cyrus Harmon contributed reporting. This investigation was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.

Summary

• Families describe raising children with severe disabilities with little to no support, amid stigma that claims their children are cursed.
• A pediatric neurologist says nine in every ten cerebral palsy cases seen at JFK Hospital result from oxygen deprivation during labor —  largely preventable when birth occurs in a medical facility.
• The National Commission on Disabilities estimates roughly one million Liberians live with disabilities, but it only has funds to help 5,000 people.
• An American missionary family with their only special needs child has inspired a peer support group that shares lifechanging knowledge and hope.

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

MOUNT BARCLAY, Montserrado County — Victoria remembers the moment when her joy at delivering a baby girl turned to fear. The baby came early, at Victoria’s home. She did not cry. The midwife turned her upside down, trying everything to get a sound out of her.

The girl is now ten. She cannot walk. She cannot talk. She cannot feed herself and requires 24/7 care. FrontPage Africa is withholding the family’s last names to protect them from stigma. Stigma is something these families know well. People in Victoria’s community told her that her daughter was a dragon.

For a time Victoria believed them. Even pastors told her a snake had been sent on her daughter. She tried fasting, praying, spiritual interventions — all of it.

“Many days, I used to cry over her,” Victoria said. “When you see someone who gave birth at the same time as you and that person’s child is walking around, and your own child is just sitting, it brings tears. It can really hurt.”

What Victoria now knows is that her daughter is not cursed. She has a condition – cerebral palsy – likely caused during birth. She has a set of things a caregiver can do to help. She now knows that her daughter is one of an estimated one million Liberians living with a range of medical disabilities that can happen to anyone. Noone records how many are born with these conditions in Liberia but global rates suggest it is likely more than 1000 children are born in Liberia each year with severe disabilities.

Life for these families is upended. With no external support carers are often forced to quit jobs; they’re abandoned by spouses and given none of the training that could improve the child’s life. Severe stigma can leave families isolated. Some children are abandoned.

Disabilities in general receive little attention in Liberia’s extremely cash strapped public health system. According to the National Commission on Disabilities, the sole government program for disabilities is a pilot program that aims to reach just 5,000 people over five years — with financial assistance earmarked for just 20 school-age children in its first year.

A family upended in an instant, then a lifetime of struggle

Cerebral palsy has left Victoria’s daughter’s muscles stiff and tight. She has tremors and involuntary jerking of her hands and feet. For a time, Victoria wrapped her daughter’s curving foot in bandages trying to fix it. Nobody told her the curving was not in the foot at all — it was a nerve problem rooted in the brain that could be treated by stretching and strengthening exercises, surgery or medications.

Victoria is on her own providing care for her daughter. Her father has never accepted his daughter’s condition. When he visits he does not play with her. Victoria had to abandon her training to be a nurse. She carries the girl to the bathroom, bathes her, feeds and dresses her — work made physically harder now Victoria is pregnant again, with a new husband.  

Tragically most cerebral palsy in Liberia can be prevented when the birth takes place in a hospital. Dr. Charles Oguni has run JFK Hospital’s pediatric neurology clinic long enough to know how most of these stories begin. A mother goes into labor. The labor is long. The facility where she is delivering does not recognize the danger — or recognizes it and sends her home anyway.

“’Go home,’ they tell her. ‘It is not your time.’ She comes back the next day. ‘Go home. It is not your time.’”

By the third day, the placenta — the organ through which oxygen and nutrients pass from mother to child — has begun to separate. Blood supplying oxygen to the baby’s brain is reduced. The brain begins to sustain damage. By the time the baby is born, the first thing anyone notices is that it does not cry. Nine in every ten cerebral palsy cases Dr. Oguni sees at JFK trace back to this moment.

Last month alone, 77 babies were brought to JFK’s emergency room showing signs of oxygen deprivation, he said. Of the fifteen admitted, six died. Four in every ten babies who arrive at JFK with oxygen deprivation do not survive. The ones who do are often left with cerebral palsy.

“When I was a student in obstetrics. I was told that the sun should not sit twice on a woman in labor,” Dr. Oguni said. “But you hear some mothers telling you they labored for two days, three days. Why would a facility keep them for that long before sending them to JFK? It is so improper.”

He described a patient he saw two days before this interview. A mother had labored at home for twenty-four hours. She then went to a facility and labored for another full day before being referred to JFK — by which time the damage was done.

“For quite some hours, I feel this depression deep within me. Because these conditions could have been prevented,” Dr. Oguni said. “The way to manage cerebral palsy is not to have it.”

Other conditions that limit children’s development are impossible to avoid. Down syndrome is  is a genetic condition —present in the child’s chromosomes from the moment of conception. Children with Down syndrome may have intellectual disabilities, heart problems, and thyroid issues, but many can learn, attend school, and live fulfilling lives with the right support. Severe autism is another disorder. It is not well understood but genetics are the strongest known factor. It can cause difficulties with communication, social interaction, and behavior, often alongside intellectual disability, minimal or no verbal language, and a need for, round-the-clock support.

What all conditions share in Liberia is this: families receive a diagnosis if they can make it JFK. JFK does what it can to support them. But financial constraints mean that help is limited.

Dr. Oguni said JFK explains diagnoses to every parent. The hospital has a rehabilitation center offering physiotherapy and speech therapy, free of charge for children under 14. It has an endocrinology clinic for Down syndrome cases up to 16 years.

But the medications needed to manage the disorders are a different story: muscle relaxants, nerve-stimulating drugs that can help reactivate damaged brain pathways; medications that must be taken every day for their lifetimes but must be bought from abroad — because families could not afford them and suppliers stopped importing them.

Liberia has no pediatric cardiac surgeon, meaning Down syndrome children who need heart surgery must seek care outside the country. The country has only one pediatric endocrinologist for the entire population. The neurology clinic sees more than 200 cerebral palsy cases every month — about one third of them new patients, some coming for the first time after years of managing alone because no one ever directed them to the clinic.

And when families stop coming — worn down by transport costs, by years of watching a child whose condition is not visibly improving — said they simply disappear.”They tell me they cannot come back because they are just spending money on transport and their child’s condition is not changing,” Dr. Oguni said. “You will not blame them.”

Janet and her husband did not even know there was anything wrong with their son until he was two years old. It took an aunt to flag that the child still could not sit, could not speak and that something was seriously wrong. JFK eventually diagnosed the child with cerebral palsy, a condition so foreign to Janet that she does not remember the name to this day.

Luckily for Janet and her son, the father has stayed. The boy, now 5, requires constant support. But the family’s lack of knowledge about the condition has had profound impacts. Jason’s father questioned whether the condition had come from Janet’s side of the family, causing problems in their marriage. (Cerebral palsy is not genetic). Janet has avoided having another child.

“I got scared. Even now when people ask me if I will have another child, I say no. What if I go back and see the same thing again?”

Doctors say because the condition is caused by injury or pregnancy complications, a second child is no more likely to have it than any other child.

A failing healthcare system leaves families with few choices

In more developed countries these families have extensive support. In Rwanda, which is leading healthcare system reform on the continent, families have expanding national support and community-based programs. Public schools are training teachers in inclusive education, allowing children with learning and physical disabilities to study alongside their peers. Specialized centers offer tailored education plans, speech and physical therapy, and counseling to help parents navigate daily challenges. While resource challenges remain, experts say Rwanda’s model demonstrates how targeted investment and community health networks can help remove social stigma and give every child a chance to succeed.

In Liberia, outside of JFK, the government provides nothing. Mohamed Saka, program manager for the Disabilities Commission said the organization received just US$210,000 from government this fiscal year—up from US$200,000 the year before—but estimated it would need at least US$5 million to address even half of the country’s disability-related needs. He said the Commission does not currently have the technical capacity to provide services for children with conditions such as cerebral palsy and Down syndrome and is seeking partnerships with organizations with that experience.

FrontPage Africa/New Narratives contacted XX, the spokesman for the Ministry of Education, with questions about government support for families of children with complex needs. He did not respond before publication.

An American Missionary Family Shares Knowledge and Hope

An American missionary family with their own experience of cerebral palsy is doing their best to help. Amanda Brook and her husband had worked in the country since 2017. After their youngest daughter suffered a severe brain injury during birth in a US hospital, causing cerebral palsy, they fought to help improve her quality of life. As soon as she was healthy enough, they returned, determined to find a way to do the work they loved while raising a special needs child.

Soon they met Felecia Gibson who was raising a grandson with disabilities. Brook and Gibson spent hours sharing their experiences. Word quickly spread through the community that there was “a white baby like ours,” and families began arriving at Brooks’ home.

Those informal conversations grew into “King’s Kids”, a support group that brings together caregivers for practical training, emotional support and fellowship. Brooks said she chose the name because she wanted families to hear a different message from the one many had grown up with: that their children were not witches, dragons or cursed, but children created in the image of God and worthy of love and dignity.

King’s Kids teaches mothers how to position their children to avoid pressure sores. It shows them feeding techniques for children who have difficulty swallowing, and exercises that can help maintain muscle function and improve comfort. It creates a space where mothers who have been told their children are dragons and witches and snakes can sit together and say — my child is not cursed. My child is here. My child is loved.

The group has been life-changing for families. For many, the first King’s Kids session was the first time anyone had ever explained their child’s condition to them at all.

“I did not know the name,” said Felecia Gibson. “I did not know what caused it. I did not know what I could do. When they told me, I cried. Not because it was bad news. Because finally someone was telling me something true.”

Janet recalled a Bible passage read at a King’s Kids meeting — about a blind man whose disciples asked whether his condition was punishment for sin.

“Jesus said no,” Janet said. “It happened that God’s glory would be shown. From that day, I came home and I read that passage over and over again. And God encouraged me.”

She posts her son’s photographs on social media now. The couple takes him outside. They tell him they love him every day. “Before I used to look at him like I was being cursed. Now I feel like God has blessed me.”

And they have been inspired. Victoria’s mother-in-law founded her own informal school in a church building — currently capped at fourth grade — specifically so her granddaughter would have somewhere to go.

“She is not a witch,” Victoria said. “She never was. She is my child. And she deserves to be here.”

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.

Summary:

• A 57-year-old grandmother in Todee District says she was raped in January. Seven months later, her case has not been heard, no government official has visited her, and the family of the accused has approached her with money and gifts, asking her to drop the case.
• The head of the SGBV unit at the Ministry of Justice concedes a lack of funds has meant his office has secured just two convictions in six years.
• The vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia calls the failure to deliver justice for victims “a national emergency.”

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

TODEE DISTRICT, Montserrado County — The first time they came, they brought L$18,000  (US$100). The second time the family brought a lapa, a traditional cloth.

When the family, whose 24-year-old son had been accused by multiple witnesses of raping the 57-year-old grandmother in broad daylight in front of her small grandson,  arrived with the cloth, the woman says she understood exactly what it meant.

“The boy ma bring the lapa; That the cloth her son take from on me,” she said in Liberian English. “That the cloth she come put back on me.”

She understood what the money was for too. “They are begging so I can agree so they can free their son.”

Most victims in Liberia eventually accept the money. Though the grandmother says she badly wants justice, she is beginning to think she has no choice but to do the same.

The woman’s quest for justice, documented by FrontPage Africa/New Narratives since January when she and witnesses say the crime took place, has shown the extraordinary obstacles that any victim of sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia must overcome, particularly those from rural areas. She and her community have had to raise hundreds of dollars – including to transport and detain the accused. The case was delayed when the case files, in the paper-based system, were lost. Finally the case has stalled because neither the woman nor the court have the funds to bring her to the courtroom in Monrovia.

The case has been a window into the dysfunctional justice system which has seen just two convictions in six years, says Isaac George, head of the Sexual and Gender Based Violence unit at the Ministry of Justice.

George said his unit has about 300 reported cases on his books right now. The unit has no functional forensic DNA laboratory to test semen samples and no vehicle for field visits. The only evidence they have in most rape cases rests largely on physical examinations at One Stop rape centers, which defense lawyers routinely challenge in court as opinion rather than scientific proof.

After the grandmother’s case made national news, George spoke to her by phone and told her she would have to find someone to bring her to Monrovia.  

“We do not have the means of going to Todee,” George said. “We do not have the means of shuttling from here to Todee and back. No. I blame the system. It is a systemic problem within our justice sector.”

And now, with two terms of court gone, the accused rapist, a 24-year-old identified in court records as Mohammed Bah, is eligible for bail because his case has not been heard in a timely manner. Like an 8-year-old victim whose case New Narratives exposed in February, the grandmother may soon have to live with the alleged perpetrator back in her community.

“If she doesn’t show up after two terms of court, we have no choice but to release him,” George said. “That is it.”

“Women are no longer safe,” said Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia. She said the pattern in this case has become routine. And defense lawyers are now learning to game the system.

“It is a new form — the defense moving in and saying failure to proceed — and then you see rape suspects walking freely and going back and committing more rape,” Taylor Kelly said. “And then we still have this perpetual cycle of SGBV going on because people see that they are not being dealt with within the full extent of the law.”

“This should not be happening in a civilized society. It has become a national emergency,” says Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia.

$22 Million EU-Funded Spotlight Project Fails to Deliver Justice

Many experts hoped things would have been better by now. The European Union’s Spotlight Initiative arrived in Liberia in 2017 as part of a 5-year $22 million partnership with the United Nations, promising to help women and girls live free from violence. (It was part of a bigger project in 8 countries in Africa). It could point to real breakthroughs: traditional leaders signed an unprecedented statement in 2019 banning female genital mutilation and closing the “bush schools” where the practice is carried out, and the country built new systems to track gender-based violence cases. But a 2023 audit by the European Court of Auditors found that the promise on paper rarely reached the women it was meant to protect. Because no law actually criminalized FGM, victims still struggled to access justice, and auditors who visited the country were told the practice continued in the very counties that had signed up to the ban. The Domestic Violence Act, approved in 2019, remained hobbled by practical and cultural obstacles — and the initiative had no way of monitoring whether any of these laws were being enforced at all.

For rural women, the gap between commitment and protection is starkest in the justice system itself. The audit found that reported cases of violence against women in Liberia fell, rather than rose, over the life of the program — from a baseline of 2,105 down to 920 — a drop that auditors said signaled the difficulty of reaching and being believed by an under-resourced system, where police and court records are often too incomplete to even classify a complaint as gender-based violence.

Attitudes appeared to harden: Liberia was one of only two African countries where the share of people who believed a man was justified in beating his wife worsened over the period measured. And with the four-year program judged far too short to shift entrenched social norms — surveyed EU officials estimated real change takes around sixteen years — much of the work risked unravelling once the money was gone, since most of the activities auditors examined in Liberia were found unlikely to be sustainable.

New Narratives’ reporting shows that the auditors warnings have come true.

A new $13 million “Spotlight 2.0.” kicked off in 2025 and runs until 2029. A Gender-Based Violence Information Management System is planned that is supposed to strengthen how cases are recorded and shared across the system. The system is meant to function as a secure national database: when a survivor reports abuse at a clinic, police station, one-stop center, or safe home, trained staff enter basic case details and the services provided, helping the government see where cases cluster, where services are missing, and whether survivors are being followed up. It is intended to improve coordination, services, and data systems with the Ministry of Gender in a central role.

Activists say the case should be a wakeup call to the government to accelerate that work. Taylor Kelly says said the SGBV unit must receive the vehicles, equipment, and budget to reach survivors where they are. She said community-level legal aid and referral systems must exist so a woman in Todee does not have to navigate a city she has never visited to access justice.

“The state cannot take a responsibility and just put it on one group of people. You will have to lead,” she said.

“Let us go to court“

After three visits from the family, the grandmother is still holding out. She knows what the money and gifts buy: her silence, his freedom, the end of a case that has already cost her more than anyone has acknowledged.

She knows her photograph went on social media after the rape. She knows what her community saw. She knows what they said about her. When the family came with their apologies and their cloth and their money, she felt all of it at once — the violation, the public humiliation, and now the quiet pressure to make it disappear.

“All that I passed through,” she said. “My picture go all on Facebook. You supposed to know that your son bring big disgrace on me. All that one — his family coming to beg.”

She still holds a belief, after months of silence from the state, that what happened to her should be said out loud in a room where people have to listen.

“Let us go to court,” she says. “Let us talk the thing that happened to me so people can understand.”

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.

Summary:

• A 57-year-old grandmother in Todee District says she was raped in January. Seven months later, her case has not been heard, no government official has visited her, and the family of the accused has approached her with money and gifts, asking her to drop the case.
• The head of the SGBV unit at the Ministry of Justice concedes a lack of funds has meant his office has secured just two convictions in six years.
• The vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia calls the failure to deliver justice for victims “a national emergency.”

By Tetee Gebro, gender and health correspondent with New Narratives

TODEE DISTRICT, Montserrado County — The first time they came, they brought L$18,000  (US$100). The second time the family brought a lapa, a traditional cloth.

When the family, whose 24-year-old son had been accused by multiple witnesses of raping the 57-year-old grandmother in broad daylight in front of her small grandson,  arrived with the cloth, the woman says she understood exactly what it meant.

“The boy ma bring the lapa; That the cloth her son take from on me,” she said in Liberian English. “That the cloth she come put back on me.”

She understood what the money was for too. “They are begging so I can agree so they can free their son.”

Most victims in Liberia eventually accept the money. Though the grandmother says she badly wants justice, she is beginning to think she has no choice but to do the same.

The woman’s quest for justice, documented by FrontPage Africa/New Narratives since January when she and witnesses say the crime took place, has shown the extraordinary obstacles that any victim of sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia must overcome, particularly those from rural areas. She and her community have had to raise hundreds of dollars – including to transport and detain the accused. The case was delayed when the case files, in the paper-based system, were lost. Finally the case has stalled because neither the woman nor the court have the funds to bring her to the courtroom in Monrovia.

The case has been a window into the dysfunctional justice system which has seen just two convictions in six years, says Isaac George, head of the Sexual and Gender Based Violence unit at the Ministry of Justice.

George said his unit has about 300 reported cases on his books right now. The unit has no functional forensic DNA laboratory to test semen samples and no vehicle for field visits. The only evidence they have in most rape cases rests largely on physical examinations at One Stop rape centers, which defense lawyers routinely challenge in court as opinion rather than scientific proof.

After the grandmother’s case made national news, George spoke to her by phone and told her she would have to find someone to bring her to Monrovia.  

“We do not have the means of going to Todee,” George said. “We do not have the means of shuttling from here to Todee and back. No. I blame the system. It is a systemic problem within our justice sector.”

And now, with two terms of court gone, the accused rapist, a 24-year-old identified in court records as Mohammed Bah, is eligible for bail because his case has not been heard in a timely manner. Like an 8-year-old victim whose case New Narratives exposed in February, the grandmother may soon have to live with the alleged perpetrator back in her community.

“If she doesn’t show up after two terms of court, we have no choice but to release him,” George said. “That is it.”

“Women are no longer safe,” said Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia. She said the pattern in this case has become routine. And defense lawyers are now learning to game the system.

“It is a new form — the defense moving in and saying failure to proceed — and then you see rape suspects walking freely and going back and committing more rape,” Taylor Kelly said. “And then we still have this perpetual cycle of SGBV going on because people see that they are not being dealt with within the full extent of the law.”

“This should not be happening in a civilized society. It has become a national emergency,” says Bowoulo Taylor Kelly, vice president of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia.

$22 Million EU-Funded Spotlight Project Fails to Deliver Justice

Many experts hoped things would have been better by now. The European Union’s Spotlight Initiative arrived in Liberia in 2017 as part of a 5-year $22 million partnership with the United Nations, promising to help women and girls live free from violence. (It was part of a bigger project in 8 countries in Africa). It could point to real breakthroughs: traditional leaders signed an unprecedented statement in 2019 banning female genital mutilation and closing the “bush schools” where the practice is carried out, and the country built new systems to track gender-based violence cases. But a 2023 audit by the European Court of Auditors found that the promise on paper rarely reached the women it was meant to protect. Because no law actually criminalized FGM, victims still struggled to access justice, and auditors who visited the country were told the practice continued in the very counties that had signed up to the ban. The Domestic Violence Act, approved in 2019, remained hobbled by practical and cultural obstacles — and the initiative had no way of monitoring whether any of these laws were being enforced at all.

For rural women, the gap between commitment and protection is starkest in the justice system itself. The audit found that reported cases of violence against women in Liberia fell, rather than rose, over the life of the program — from a baseline of 2,105 down to 920 — a drop that auditors said signaled the difficulty of reaching and being believed by an under-resourced system, where police and court records are often too incomplete to even classify a complaint as gender-based violence.

Attitudes appeared to harden: Liberia was one of only two African countries where the share of people who believed a man was justified in beating his wife worsened over the period measured. And with the four-year program judged far too short to shift entrenched social norms — surveyed EU officials estimated real change takes around sixteen years — much of the work risked unravelling once the money was gone, since most of the activities auditors examined in Liberia were found unlikely to be sustainable.

New Narratives’ reporting shows that the auditors warnings have come true.

A new $13 million “Spotlight 2.0.” kicked off in 2025 and runs until 2029. A Gender-Based Violence Information Management System is planned that is supposed to strengthen how cases are recorded and shared across the system. The system is meant to function as a secure national database: when a survivor reports abuse at a clinic, police station, one-stop center, or safe home, trained staff enter basic case details and the services provided, helping the government see where cases cluster, where services are missing, and whether survivors are being followed up. It is intended to improve coordination, services, and data systems with the Ministry of Gender in a central role.

Activists say the case should be a wakeup call to the government to accelerate that work. Taylor Kelly says said the SGBV unit must receive the vehicles, equipment, and budget to reach survivors where they are. She said community-level legal aid and referral systems must exist so a woman in Todee does not have to navigate a city she has never visited to access justice.

“The state cannot take a responsibility and just put it on one group of people. You will have to lead,” she said.

“Let us go to court“

After three visits from the family, the grandmother is still holding out. She knows what the money and gifts buy: her silence, his freedom, the end of a case that has already cost her more than anyone has acknowledged.

She knows her photograph went on social media after the rape. She knows what her community saw. She knows what they said about her. When the family came with their apologies and their cloth and their money, she felt all of it at once — the violation, the public humiliation, and now the quiet pressure to make it disappear.

“All that I passed through,” she said. “My picture go all on Facebook. You supposed to know that your son bring big disgrace on me. All that one — his family coming to beg.”

She still holds a belief, after months of silence from the state, that what happened to her should be said out loud in a room where people have to listen.

“Let us go to court,” she says. “Let us talk the thing that happened to me so people can understand.”

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.

Summary

• A measles outbreak struck a remote town in January, sickening several families before anyone understood what was spreading through the community.
• Families treated sick children with herbs and home remedies, including alcohol, because clinics were far, locked, or had no medicine. One four-year-old boy died. Another lost his hearing.
• Liberia faces a vaccine financing gap of more than US$1 million a year as World Bank support ends in 2026. Health advocates warn what happened in Kiangia Town could happen anywhere if that gap is not filled.

By Tetee Gebro and Joyclyn Wea, gender and health correspondents with New Narratives

KIANGIA TOWN, Todee District — The measles came to this town in January.

Nobody announced it. Nobody warned families here. It moved quietly from home to home, the way measles does — through the air, between children playing; spreading before anyone understood what was happening.

By the time people in Kiangia Town realized an outbreak was unfolding, several families were already fighting it. There were no medications at the nearest clinic. In some cases there was no clinic open at all. So parents and grandparents turned to what they could find — traditional remedies of leaves, beans, honey and alcohol that experts say would do nothing at all.

Some children survived. Samuel did not. He was four years old.

Health advocates say Samuel’s death was avoidable; what happened in Kiangia Town is a warning of what could happen across the country as donor money for vaccines dries up.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases in the world. One infected person can spread it to as many as eighteen others in an unvaccinated community. It is especially dangerous for children. It is one of the leading causes of childhood blindness in West Africa. Children who develop brain inflammation — one of measles’ most serious complications — have a one-in-four chance of permanent damage, including deafness, seizures, or intellectual disability. Measles kills about one percent of those it infects in Liberia — and in the poorest, most remote districts, that figure can reach ten percent.

To stop it from spreading, health experts say at least ninety-five percent of a community must be vaccinated. Below that level, the disease moves quickly — and in communities like Kiangia Town, it moves without resistance. 

Measles vaccination coverage in Liberia currently stands at 82 percent — a significant recovery after it dropped to just 58 percent during the COVID pandemic in 2021, but still well below the 95 percent threshold needed to stop the disease from spreading. And now, the money that has helped protect Liberian children against measles is running out.

Liberia has relied on foreign partners to pay for vaccines. Between 2020 and 2024, the Global Vaccine Alliance, known as GAVI, gave US$13 million to the country’s immunization program. Liberia’s government gave US$2 million in co-financing— about 15 percent of the cost, below the 20 percent share Gavi expects. But the money did not come from the government’s coffers. Instead, the World Bank provided loans to the government to pay its share.

Now the World Bank is ending the loans. Starting this year, the government must find more than US$1 million annually to pay for vaccines. Advocates are worried. In 2021 and 2023, the Weah administration disbursed nothing at all toward vaccine co-financing.

But in Liberia, even when money is allocated it doesn’t reach people. A June 2025 report by Public Health Initiative Liberia found that lawmakers approved US$79 million for primary health care over those years, but only US$28 million was actually spent. More than US$51 million never reached the clinics and communities it was meant for. The money had been approved. It just never arrived. 

“When funding is not available on time, it results in stock-outs,” said Joyce L. Kilikpo, executive director of Public Health Initiative Liberia. “Children come to the facility, but the vaccines are not there. These are not just numbers. These are children who will be left unprotected. Some of them will be permanently damaged. Some of them will die — and none of that has to happen.”

With no warning and no medicine, families were left to fight the outbreak alone

Even an early warning of the outbreak may have saved Samuel’s life. His grandmother Rebecca, brought him and his three-year-old sister home to Kiangia Town from their home with their mother in Fendell, not knowing measles was already moving through the community.

One night at church Rebecca felt feverish. The children were restless and clingy. By the next morning, their skin was hot. She gave them boiled herbs Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The fever did not break. Their skin kept getting hotter. By Wednesday, she heard the word measles for the first time along with more advice for traditional cures.

“They say maybe that the thing what is passing around in the town, look for beans leave and boil it,” she said. She mixed the leaves with honey and fermented cane juice that had become alcoholic.

But the children were getting worse. The little girl’s palms were covered in bumps. Her eyes turned red and her feet blue. Neither child could sleep. During the day they would not eat. When Rebecca and her sister, who was helping her, forced food into them they vomited it back.

By Thursday, neither child could open their eyes. By Friday, Rebecca found Samuel unable to move. The people around her told her not to worry. The sun was hot, they said. She rubbed chalk on him. His tiny body began stiffening.

Her sister grabbed him and they ran. The first clinic they reached was locked. At Plemu Clinic, the health worker said he could not treat him. “The way the boy looking, I can’t touch him,” Rebecca recalled him saying. “You carry him to the next clinic.”

By the time they arrived at Gballey Kamarah Memorial Clinic, Samuel was gone.

When asked why she waited so many days before going to the clinic? Rebecca’s answer was simple and devastating. “No money.” 

Plemu Clinic did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

Samuel’s mother was in Fendell. His father and the father of his sister had disappeared during the pregnancies. Rebecca’s own husband died in 2020. She survived by doing daily labor when she can find it — earning the equivalent of US$2.50 a day.Also in Kiangia Town Marcia Morris was fighting the same battle, with three children sick.

Their bodies burned with fever. Their eyes became red and swollen. One child vomited whenever he tried to eat.

Morris took them to the nearest clinic. But there is no cure for measles. Health workers can only manage the fever with paracetamol, and the World Health Organization recommends vitamin A supplements to reduce the severity and risk of death. At the clinic Morris reached, there was nothing.

Morris’s children survived but her oldest son, 13, lost a significant amount of his eyesight. Days passed before health workers arrived from Monrovia. By then, the outbreak had already done what outbreaks do when they meet communities without vaccines. It had taken what it came for and moved on.

About 45 minutes drive away in Garnos Town, Fatu Jarbateh’s body began to ache and she thought it was from hard work in the field beating palm and digging cassava. When the headache came and her body began to feel heavy, she waited.

Then her skin got hot. Red bumps spread across her body. Her eyes turned red. Soon her baby became sick too and she became scared. “We walk for two hour before we reach to the clinic,” she said. “No bike.”

At the Gballey Kamarah Memorial Clinic the pair were diagnosed with measles. Fatu could not say what the clinic gave them and the clinic refused to speak to FrontPage Africa/New Narratives directing all questions to the Ministry of Health. But Fatu said staff told her both she and the child might have died had they come later.

Fatu does not know anything about World Bank loans or co-financing agreements. But when asked what she thought about international partners cutting the funding that helps pay for vaccines in Liberia, her answer was clear.

“We will just die,” she said. “All of us.”

A New U.S. Health Compact That Does Not Buy Vaccines

There will be no help coming from anywhere else. The cuts come amid a massive pullback in aid. The United States’ Trump administration has made major cuts to global bodies including a more than US$1 billion from Gavi. The United Kingdom, another major donor, has cut its foreign aid budget by 40 percent. Gavi warns the cuts could leave 75 million children unvaccinated over the next five years and cause more than 1.2 million deaths.

Liberia’s health sector is also making a painful adjustment to a new five-year health agreement with the United States, worth $124 million, slashing U.S. health aid to Liberia by more than 60 percent according to the Center for Global Development. In recent years U.S. aid made up more than half of the roughly $200 million bilateral aid given annually to Liberia.

The full text of the agreement was never officially released and became publicly available only through a leak. Health advocates said they found no provision covering the cost of routine childhood vaccines.

Advocates are calling on the Liberian government to treat vaccine financing as a fixed obligation. They want the $1 million annual co-financing required by Gavi built into the national budget and released on time. They are calling for a joint monitoring committee made up of health ministry officials, finance officials, and civil society to track vaccine spending quarterly and publish the results. And they want the government to negotiate a clear transition plan with Gavi before donor support disappears entirely.

Rep. Julie Fartoma Wiah of Lofa County has been raising the alarm for more than a year, calling for a Legislative Caucus on immunization and primary health care. New Narratives contacted Rep. Wiah directly via WhatsApp to ask whether legislators have responded to her calls. She agreed to an interview date but then did not make herself available or respond to calls or messages.

Adolphus Clarke, program manager of the Expanded Programme on Immunization at the Ministry of Health, set two interview dates over a two week period. He did not make himself available for either.

New Narratives also contacted Dr. Sia Wata Camanor, interim director-general of the National Public Health Institute of Liberia, with questions about the outbreak in Kiangia Town, vaccination coverage in Todee District, and NPHIL’s preparedness for future outbreaks as donor funding declines. Dr. Camanor asked that the questions be sent in writing. New Narratives complied but Dr. Camanor did not respond before publication.

Back in Kiangia Town, the outbreak is over. Life has returned to what it was before January — but Rebecca’s grief is still overwhelming. Rebecca asks why the government could not have warned her to keep her grandchildren away from an outbreak that could take their lives.

“Before I came here my children were alright,” she said, wishing she could go back in time. “In the morning I will bathe them and they will just lay out here sleeping.”

This story was produced in collaboration with New Narratives as part of the “Investigating Liberia” project. Funding was provided by a private donor and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The donors had no say in the story’s content.