Liberia: AFL Wants 20% Women in Uniform, Takes Recruitment Drive to Sinoe

GREENVILLE, Sinoe County — The Armed Forces of Liberia wants women in one of every five uniformed posts, a target that would require nearly tripling their share of the force, and it took that recruitment drive to Sinoe County.

Women make up about 7.5 percent of the AFL, and the government’s goal is 20 percent, according to Junior Aloysius Morris, senior policy analyst at the Ministry of National Defense, who is traveling with the outreach team.

The five-member team includes two enlisted women, Sgt. [Patricia Lincoln] and Sgt. Newton L. Newton, who are talking to women in the county about enlistment requirements, career paths and the work soldiers do. Also on the team are Morris; Boyee S. Mussah, the AFL public relations officer; and Menicond B. Yarkpazna, junior policy analyst at the Ministry of National Defense.

The team is pointing women toward professional training, promotion into leadership and selection for United Nations peacekeeping deployments, which carry allowances and overseas service that few other public-sector jobs in Liberia offer. 

The gap the campaign is trying to close is wide and has narrowed slowly. Women hold 11.5 percent of officer positions and 7.1 percent of enlisted positions, according to the project documentation. The Gender and Security Sector National Taskforce put women at 3 percent of the AFL in 2017, then the lowest share of any Liberian security institution, meaning the force has added roughly four and a half percentage points in about nine years.

The Sinoe outreach falls under a project the Ministry of National Defense and the AFL launched with UN Women on Feb. 9, 2026, titled “Strengthening Armed Forces of Liberia’s women active participation in peace and security through deployment to peacekeeping missions,” financed by the Elsie Initiative Fund. Beyond recruitment, the project funds pre-deployment preparation for female and male soldiers, including basic computer training, and public campaigns intended to counter the view of soldiering as men’s work.

The effort rests on an assessment the AFL ran in September 2022 using the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance’s Measuring Opportunities for Women in Peace Operations methodology, which examined what inside the institution keeps women from being deployed. The project is also framed against U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, which calls for more women in the institutions that prevent and settle conflict and in U.N. field operations.

The campaign is designed to reach all 15 counties, grouped into four regions, in phases determined by recruitment potential, population, the presence of secondary schools and universities, and how easily the team can move. Alongside community meetings, the campaign is to run through schools, universities, county authorities, religious leaders and women’s organizations.

Neither the ministry nor the AFL has said what the enlistment numbers from the campaign have been so far, or by what year it expects to reach 20 percent.