The project is educative, informative and has the ability to address the issues of illiteracy and sensitize young people to understand their rights as Liberian citizens which could help them in holding their leaders accountable for the wrong that they do.
The key aspects of this project are sensitizing young people through civic education to know their rights as Liberian citizens so as to be able to contribute meaningfully to the development of Liberia and to also hold their leaders accountable for the wrong they do. Another aspect of the project is reconstructing the minds of young people by financing their education through scholarship and financial aids programs and motivating them through scholastic awards programs where brilliant students are certificated and encouraged to be studious in schools.
This idea was born in 2004 while at the University. It was observed that the community where the University that I was attending was situated, most of the young people in that environment never had the means of going to school to acquire quality education. Most of the youths became workers at the university where they used to wash clothes for students in order to earn something to feed their families. I decided to lobby with my friends at the university to educate many of them instead of hiring them as workers to clean their clothes. The process worked very well and today am proud to say that my dream has come to reality as most young people are now been educated through our advocacy and hard work.
The project seeks to address the problems of violence, unemployment and illiteracy which have grown up to 80%. These were some of the contributing factors that led to the destruction of Liberia during the civil crisis. The President of Liberia, H.E. Madam Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, in 2012 described the educational sector of Liberia as a complete mess which validates the increment of illiteracy in Liberia and the weakness of the educational sector. Since our involvement and the involvement of other organizations in a robust form, there have been some changes in the educational sectors as government is now being compelled to provide more funding to support the educational sectors while other organizations are also making their contributions to solve some of the problems as well. The specific objectives of the project is to reconstruct the minds of young people through education so as to make them productive citizens of Liberia; prevail on national government to provide significant funding to address the issue of illiteracy in Liberian schools and to encourage Liberian youths to engage themselves in meaningful activities so as to become productive citizens of Liberia and the global community. We use our networking and human relations approaches, instruments or skills to achieve our goal and this has been working significantly.
We have significant number of users interacting with us on a monthly basis which have really motivated us to make significant impact in the lives of our generation. Most of their interaction is through voluntarism and direct interaction. Through voluntarism with some of these users, we strive to reach, work on our programs and concept and make sure that we set a clear agenda for outreach programs to attract more volunteers to the organization. This has been working very well. With the direct interaction aspect, most of our users interact directly with our beneficiaries, office staff and our partners as well. This gives them a form of motivation and assurance to keep us connected with institutions and individuals that we intend to solicit support from. Through direct interaction also, we provide significant responses to some of the doubts that our users/partners normally have about the project and encourage them to be a part of the team to transform Liberia’s generation positively.
A lot of lessons can be learned from this project. Some of those lessons include: trust and accountability, persuasiveness, sincerity in the pursuit of education, motivating oneself to undertake meaningful initiatives in the absence of support, the skills to attract funding to implement a project in order to benefit the community, networking skills, ideas in fund raising and skills in engaging young people to yield good results.