Francess Amadu (Sierra Leone)

In 1992, Francess Amadu was working as a nurse-midwife at a hospital in eastern Sierra Leone when the year-old civil war exploded into her area. “They bombed the hospital during the afternoon shift,” she said. With her six children and four more children of a missing friend, she walked 65 miles to a camp and then 40 more miles to the Segbwema refugee camp near the Guinea and Liberia borders.

“We had to build our own huts…there was very little food. Women were dying every day in pregnancy," she recalled. We who had some education put ourselves together to keep our people alive.”

An undeclared three-country war between Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone remains unsettled, and domestic conflict continues in Sierra Leone despite a fragile and often-violated 1999 peace agreement, so at least 100,000 refugees from all three countries have long been jammed into more than two dozen camps on either side of the country’s border.

That’s when Francess launched the Reproductive Health Group to provide information and services to refugees, especially youth and women.

Based in Conakry, her group recruited two literate, educated women from Sierra Leone in each of 28 refugee camps in Guinea and trained them for two weeks in health care and community organizing. The women then worked with camp managers to create links to the Guinea health care system that included translators and midwife training.

“We try to get them literate on these matters and tell them where to go, that they have choices…it is easy to know what is needed.”

Forced to leave Guinea amid new violence in 2001, Amadu’s group now works in Sierra Leone with local communities and the many Liberian refugees still in the area. “Reproductive health is a problem they all have and it is solved the same way for all,” she said.

Francess attended CEDPA’s 2006 WomenLead in Peace and Stability workshop, which brought together 15 women from communities emerging from conflict worldwide. There she learned about issues related to rebuilding communities following conflict, and strengthened her leadership, project management, communications and advocacy skills.

She says the workshop sessions helped her to become better at conflict resolution. She has formed new youth clubs to bring together families from the Kono District in the eastern part of Sierra Leone, where rich diamond reserves attracted constant fighting during the country’s civil war, and facilitated peace between families that had been fighting over land rights in the area.

She reports that the program improved her fundraising skills, helping her to gain funds from the local city government and the country’s AIDS secretariat for her work with women and youth, improving her organization’s sustainability.

And, she says she has worked to promote the leadership of other women in her community by training women in her area to run for office, and encouraging women to lead at every level.

“Leadership is like maturity,” she said. “It’s never finished. It’s a process of being.”

(March 2010)