EDITORIAL: Stop Using Vulnerable Children as Proof of Government Work

THERE IS A special kind of carelessness in believing that good intentions excuse bad judgment. This week, several Liberian officials — including Mo Ali, Managing Director of the Liberia Water and Sewer Corporation — offered a case study in exactly that. In an effort to show that government assistance to vulnerable children is real, they published the names, ages, schools, home addresses, and caregivers’ details of children enrolled in social protection programs. Publicly. On Facebook.

WE UNDERSTAND the impulse. Liberians have every right to be skeptical of government claims of assistance, especially when so much public commentary — fair or not — accuses officials of enriching themselves while aid fails to reach the people at the bottom. Officials feel pressure to prove they are doing something. But proving you are helping vulnerable children is not an excuse to expose them. It is, in fact, the opposite of helping them.

THIS IS NOT a gray area

Liberia’s Children’s Law of 2011 guarantees every child the right to privacy. The guidelines under that law are explicit about the disclosure of a child’s personal information to outside parties. There is no reading of that law under which publishing a vulnerable child’s name, school, and home address to a public Facebook page is acceptable — regardless of how well-meaning the intent, and regardless of who initiated it.

ATTORNEY MORIAH YEKULAH said it plainly, and she is right to say it plainly: this data has been treated as “a chess piece in the cesspool of political buffoonery.” When the identity of a child who has been removed from a dangerous situation, or flagged as street-connected, or enrolled in a reunification program, becomes a talking point in a political argument, the child has been failed twice — once by whatever circumstance put them in the program, and again by the very system meant to protect them.

THE STAKES ARE not abstract

This is Liberia. We do not have the luxury of treating this as a paperwork issue. Many of the children on these lists carry the weight of a history this country knows intimately — family separation, displacement, exploitation, the long tail of conflict that does not end when the guns go quiet. A published address is not just an administrative slip for a child who was removed from a trafficking situation or an abusive home. It is a map back to harm.

AND UNICEF’s fingerprints are on this program. That should raise the bar, not lower it. International child protection standards — developed with UNICEF’s own participation — require informed consent before this kind of information is shared, and confidentiality protocols that were plainly not followed here. Liberia’s donor partners will be watching how — and whether — this is addressed.

WHAT SHOULD happen now

The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection should open a formal investigation, as Attorney Yekula has demanded, and it should not be a quiet one. Officials who posted this information should account publicly for why they believed it was appropriate. And UNICEF, as the project’s funder, owes the country transparency about what data-handling protocols were supposed to be in place — and why they failed.

BUT BEYOND the accountability owed for this specific incident, there is a broader habit Liberian officials need to break: the instinct to treat vulnerable people as props in a public relations campaign. Assistance to vulnerable children does not need names and addresses attached to be credible. It needs oversight, consistency, and results — the kind that can be verified by auditors and journalists without ever putting a child’s safety on public display.

LIBERIA’S CHILDREN who have already lived through more than any child should have to are not evidence to be filed into a Facebook post. They are citizens this government is obligated to protect — including from the government itself.