The Niapele Project

The Niapele Project is an organization I co-founded in 2007 with Celina Guich.

Our mission is to promote sustainable strategies for the empowerment of vulnerable war-affected children, through the development of community-based initiatives.  The Niapele Project aims to have a direct, meaningful impact. We achieve this by working in partnership with communities, assisting them in fulfilling the needs they have identified, and through the development and implementation of initiatives that aim to create the necessary conditions for children to move beyond mere survival and thrive.

The Origins

For Celina and me, The Niapele Project was first and foremost a way to remain engaged with the Liberian refugee community in Ghana. Both of us had volunteered with different community-based organizations in the country’s Buduburam refugee camp in early 2007 – we felt that we couldn’t simply just go home and put the experience behind us. Living and working in the community for a couple of months, we had been truly touched by what we saw; like so many others before us, we wanted to help. Too often, though, helping can give rise to unsustainable situations. We witnessed many instances where, despite good intentions, the financial support that was being given to refugees was perpetuating helplessness, victim mentality or creating dependency.

Building trash cans for the Carolyn Miller School with the Boys Social Club - Jan 2007

While we were working there, we observed that while many community based initiatives were attempting to provide services to the most vulnerable children (orphans, abandoned children, unaccompanied minors, the disabled), they did not have the resources (financial and otherwise) to fulfill their vision. Celina and I identified this particular space as the one where we could make a difference, and thus The Niapele Project (“Niapele” means children in Kpele, a Liberian dialect) was born. 

There are no right answers; I – like others – gave a lot of cash handouts to friends and acquaintances who needed them. Can you say no to a child with malaria who needs to buy medicine? Can you say no to the pregnant mother who cannot adequately feed the six children under her care? People respond differently to these situations. Celina and I, along with the other people we work with on The Niapele Project, believe that if we really want to help, we can do so by introducing notions of mutual accountability and sustainability. In that spirit, we operate according to the following principle:

We work with community leaders who have a vision for socio-economic and human development, and who demonstrate a true commitment to their causes. By giving them the means to achieve their goals, we offer the support necessary for community-led processes to succeed.

During the spring of 2007, Celina and I incoporated The Niapele Project in California, and began raising funds for our first pilot projects in Ghana. That summer, we returned to Buduburam where we helped organize a small home for abandoned children and designed a school feeding program. Between 2007 and 2008, we had three interns liaise with us and manage our projects in the field, which was key element to ensuring the integrity and quality of our work. 

Working with the displaced 

The Buduburam refugee camp is about 30 km west of the capital of Ghana, Accra. In spite of the fact that the camp, at times was home to over 40,000 displaced people, was situated close to the capital, along a major highway, economic opportunities for the community were extremely scarce. The camp was originally set up in 1990, following the first bouts of violence that plagued Liberia and neighboring countries for nearly 15 years. Over time, international organizations, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the Government of Ghana increasingly encouraged refugees to return home, and material aid dwindled to the point where only a very small fraction of the camp’s population was receiving any form of assistance. It made sense, though: offering aid – material, legal or otherwise – to displaced people, particularly as violence wanes in their home country, can lead to undesirable protracted situations. Refugees are seldom awarded the social and political rights and the resources necessary to establish themselves independently in their country of exile. In Ghana, Liberian refugees had not been awarded Ghanaian citizenship or permanent residence since the 1990s, and, over time, the Ghanaian authorities increasingly regarded the Liberian community as a liability. 

In the early months of 2008, just as Niapele was beginning to make some real progress with our partner organizations, a crisis began to brew in the camp. A group of refugee women who organized themselves as “Refugee Women with Refugee Concerns” began a month long peaceful sit-in protest on a soccer field in the camp.  They were demanding a better repatriation package than what had been previously awarded to returnees. (The original package that the UNHCR offered repatriating refugees included transport to Monrovia, $5 USD per refugee and a restriction to 20 kg of luggage. In 2007, the stipend was raised to $100 USD.)

Protest in Buduburam

The women were asking for $1,000 per person, and for unlimited luggage. T Unfortunately, this was an unreasonable demand on their part – the cash-strapped UNHCR could never have provided this for thousands of people, and neither could the Government of Liberia or the Ghana Refugee Board. Nonetheless, while their demands made a compromise very difficult to reach, it was out of a genuine concern for the future and their livelihoods that these women attempted to make their voices heard. 

Six hundred women and children were gathered on a soccer field in the camp for over a month for this purpose, and the Ghanaian authorities threatened to take action several times, as the protest had not been cleared by the authorities, and was thus illegal under Ghanaian law. The tensions between the Ghanaian authorities and the refugees reached a peak when police officers arrested – without warrant – the 600 protesters, taking them to a detention camp for over two weeks. During the police intervention in the camp, dozens of men were also arrested, and sixteen refugees were deported to Liberia, in most cases illegally. Following these events, and the ensuing trial of 23 of the 600 detained women, who were declared illegal immigrants and ordered to be deported by a Ghanaian judge, the Government of Ghana, along with the UNHCR and the Government of Liberia, made clear their intentions to close down Buduburam. Once refugees were being classified as illegal immigrants, the Buduburam community clearly understood that it was the beginning of the end of their asylum in Ghana. 

New beginnings in Liberia 

A consequence of this crisis was that we had to hastily make plans for The Niapele Project to move its operations out of Buduburam. Our community partners, like most refugees in the camp, had decided to return to Liberia as soon as possible. Most refugees at Buduburam experienced serious psychological, physical and emotional trauma during the war, and the events of early 2008 made people feel unsafe and threatened. The wave of “voluntary” repatriation which followed these events led The Niapele Project to Monrovia, Liberia during the summer of 2008, where we were to continue working with our Buduburam partners. 

Operating in a refugee camp was challenging, but we were working in a well-defined, small community, and the relationships we had created were strong. Moving to Liberia posed myriad new challenges for us. Navigating the intricacies of bureaucracy in a post-conflict environment and continuing to work effectively was made particularly difficult as the financial crisis began to unfold – suddenly, we saw our funding reduced dramatically, as donors and supporters cut back on their support. 

Nonetheless, we have been making a lot of progress over the course of the year as we continue to establish our presence in Liberia. Through an official partnership with the Liberian Refugee Repatriation and Resettlement Commission, we ensure that we align our work with government strategies to deal with displacement and returnee issues. As we continue to learn about what works and what doesn’t, and how best we can make a difference, we are constantly re-evaluating our own strategies. Following the events of 2008 in Buduburam, we felt very strongly that the realization of social, political and economic rights is the foundation upon which sustainable livelihoods can be built. It would be naive of us to operate in post-conflict Liberia without taking into account these factors. We carry on working with organizations that provide direct services to vulnerable children, and hope to expand our portfolio of community partners in the future. Meanwhile, we are also diversifying our activities by encouraging and promoting educated civic engagement. Since June 2009, Niapele’s new partnership with NewLiberian.com - a U.S.-based online publication for Liberians and the diaspora, has allowed us to expand on this role. 

This is their story too 

One of our core principles is that we believe in the spirit of cooperation. Since we started Niapele in 2007, we have been steadily growing our network of relationships with like-minded individuals and organizations working towards the same goals. First and foremost, Megan Sullivan, who started working with us in the spring of 2008, has shown an incredible amount of dedication to the cause. Having volunteered at Buduburam herself in 2007, her ties to the community remain strong – and in her role as country director in Liberia since April 2009, she is helping move Niapele forward in leaps and bounds. My friend and brilliant development economics thinker, Clem Landers, has also been providing invaluable level headed, relevant and useful advice to Niapele since our early beginnings. We have also relied on the support from several other people with ties to the Liberian refugee community in Ghana; their assistance continues to be essential to our work. 

The unforgettable Dystin "Miss Dee" Johnson

We co-founded Bududuburam Refugee Concerns International, an information and advocacy platform, as a tribute to the Refugee Women with Refugee Concerns group formed at Buduburam in early 2008. The individuals and organizations which compose BRCI have been key information sharing partners. I am particularly grateful to our UN contact in Ghana (who shall remain anonymous, but he knows who he is), and Catherine Boyle, Erin Threlfall, Marlee Furman, Penelope Nelson, Kylie Buday – to name a few – whose compassion and determination inspire our work. 

Currently…

As of August 2009, we have two initiatives under way in Liberia:

• School Nutrition Initiative. A program we first ran in Buduburam in 2007-2008, the initiative provides daily meals to about 600 students at the Carolyn A. Miller School, a private, tuition-free school, which is operated by a locally managed (and internationally funded) organization, Vision Awake Africa for Development. We designed the School Nutrition Initiative so that it would have positive externalities, by creating employment and income generation opportunities for the community. We are particularly thrilled to be sourcing a majority of the food used in the program from a women’s agricultural co-op. Our team in the field has been working hard to ensure that there is a good balance between cost-effectiveness and the maximization of benefits to the community. At about 16 cents per meal, the School Nutrition Initiative is a one-of-a-kind program in Liberia. We hope to validate this model for school feeding – one which relies on local expertise and local production – through regular monitoring activities and impact evaluation assessments carried out by our nutrition consultant. 

• Harmony Center. We are also helping the Harmony Center for handicapped children restart its operations in Monrovia. The center was set up in 2007 by families of disabled children in Buduburam. Similar to Liberia now, there were no services provided to disabled children or their caregivers, and these children were almost always unable to go to school. The result of a lack of socialization and education opportunities is that disabled children end up becoming marginalized and dependent on their families. The Harmony Center aims to alleviate some of the pressures felt by families, while providing disabled children with the care, attention and intellectual development support they need. In a country where an estimated 16 percent of the population is disabled, and where resources for services for the disabled are quasi non-existent, the Harmony Center offers a place of solace for the children and their families. 

August 2009

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