Liberia: Armed Forces of Liberia Courts Women Recruits in Grand Gedeh

ZWEDRU, Grand Gedeh County – Women fill fewer than one in 13 uniforms in the Armed Forces of Liberia. The AFL went to Grand Gedeh County this week to ask young women to change that.

A military delegation told students in Zwedru that the Armed Forces needs to expand its ranks and wants qualified young Liberians, particularly women, to apply. The delegation described the AFL as a professional institution offering personal and career development, and said it values professionalism, dignity, commitment, willingness to serve, discipline and leadership.

Women hold 7.5 percent of positions in the force, including 11.5 percent of officer slots and 7.1 percent of enlisted slots, according to a Defense Ministry project document. In 2017, the Gender and Security Sector National Taskforce put women at 3 percent of the AFL, the lowest of any Liberian security institution at the time.

The Defense Ministry and the AFL launched a project on Feb. 9 with UN Women, funded by the Elsie Initiative Fund, to raise the number of Liberian women in uniform and qualify more of them for United Nations peacekeeping deployment, including in command positions. The project pairs recruitment outreach with a nationwide campaign to challenge the assumption that soldiering is men’s work.

That campaign is to run in all 15 counties, grouped into four regions and rolled out in phases through community meetings, school and university outreach, media work and stakeholder dialogues. It targets families, educators, county authorities, religious leaders and women’s groups on the reasoning that the barrier to women enlisting sits as much in households and communities as in the barracks.

The AFL measured those barriers in September 2022, using an assessment methodology developed by the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance to gauge the military’s capacity to deploy women to peacekeeping operations and ensure they participate meaningfully once there.