Tag: Monrovia

Liberia Federation Response to Covid-19

On behalf of the Federation of Liberia Urban Poor Savers and YMCA Liberia – SDI presents the work to fight COVID-19 in Liberia.

Malnutrition and disease means COVID – 19 could be more deadly in Africa than elsewhere in the world. Health systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, including in Liberia, have limited capacity to absorb large numbers of patients made sick by the pandemic. The impacts of COVID-19 will have profound human, social, and economic consequences for millions of urban poor in Liberia. The Federation of Liberia Urban Poor Savers (FOLUPS) and the YMCA are working together on mitigation activities in a number of slums across Liberia’s capital city, Monrovia. These include West Point, Clara Town, Cow Field, Blamo Town, and King Peter communities, with activities targeting approximately 170,000 people, as per a recent community profile conducted. Most of these slum communities have limited access to basic water and sanitation services. These conditions, combined with high population densities, are likely to contribute to the person to person contact rates of COVID-19 and result in exponential rates of infection in these cities.

As of mid-May 2020, health authorities in Liberia reported 229 confirmed cases, 22 death, and 123 recovered.  The Ministry of Health’s capacity to provide critical care is still unknown, as severe forms of COVID-19 leads to respiratory failure which requires ventilators, uninterrupted electricity, and oxygen. It is unclear whether Liberia’s government health system has the capacity to provide this level of support, especially for large numbers of people. At the moment, Liberia’s Intensive Care Units (ICU) have limited ventilators, unstable electricity and limited personal protective equipment for health care workers. Because of this limited capacity to absorb the pandemic it is critical that efforts are taken to contain the number of cases and rate of spread of the disease. As such, the overall strategic approach to address Covid-19 will focus on containment and aggressive preventive measures.

In Liberia, as in many countries, government instituted a lockdown in order to contain Covid-19. While this is an effective measure, the impacts of lockdown can be devastating for urban poor communities who rely on daily income for basic needs such as water, electricity and food. Containment and preventive measures require adequate preparation, creativity and innovative ideas in collaboration with these communities to avoid severe impacts to these communities for whom a few days’ lockdown can mean the difference between poverty and starvation.

The Ministry of Youth and Sports has appointed YMCA on the COVID-19 National Youth Task Force. This puts FOLUPS in a better position to receive first-hand information, training and updates on government and civil society interventions and strategy.  As the supporting NGO to the Federation of Liberia Urban Poor Savers (FOLUPS), YMCA is collaborating with the Ministry of Health, Cities Alliance and LIFT Liberia to provide initial engagement and awareness support through women-led savings groups, community youth advocates, and peer educators groups. In order to expand the current community level engagement as a bottom-up behavior change process, FOLUPS through the YMCA has sought to expand the ongoing awareness and support services to targeted urban slum communities in Monrovia. These efforts include:

• Collaborate with the Ministry of Health to increase awareness of preventative measures required to contain the spread of COVID-19. This includes identifying and preparing communities for measures to decrease risks, and taking action to protect vulnerable groups, such as older people and those with underlying health conditions;
• Distribute flyers, hand washing buckets, disinfectants, sanitizers, soap and chlorine at public facilities and major locations;
• Engage in advocacy activities with government at settlement and city level for the early dissemination of information to affected communities in order to minimize threats of evictions and counterproductive closures of essential informal services during periods of lockdown or protracted national emergency. This includes ensuring that the fundamental rights of affected and target population groups are safeguarded, that they have access to testing and healthcare services, and that they are included in national strategies to receive information and assistance from government. Additionally, COVID-19 awareness activities will aim to prevent, anticipate and address risks of violence, discrimination, marginalization and xenophobia towards people of concern.

YMCA and FOLUPS will work as the coordinating body to engage in the co-development and delivery of the above project activities. Existing collaborating partnerships and working relationships with government officials and community structures will determine the extent to which YMCA will be able to operate freely and effectively. Capacity building will be provided by MOH and YMCA where required, in order to smoothly implement this project activities and transition to the level of community ownership for safety prevention/containment of COVID-19.

Citywide Profiling, Mapping, & Enumeration in Monrovia, Liberia

The Liberia slum dwellers federation (FOLUPS) and support NGO (YMCA) have made and impressive contribution to achieving the intended outcomes of the Cities Alliance-supported Liberia Country Program (LCP). Since 2016, they have organized slum dweller communities across Monrovia (reaching over 60 settlements); and undertaken a community-led city wide slum profiling and mapping effort (completing over 91 of Monrovia’s 113 settlements), completed a household enumeration in West Point, and organizing settlement forums for communities to verify their data and identify shared priorities for intervention. The federation will share its work with all LCP members at the upcoming city forum in April.

To date, the Liberia federation (FOLUPS) has profiled and mapped the following Local Government Areas (LGAs) within Greater Monrovia:

Congo Town LGA Profile (5 settlement profiles); Garwolohn LGA Profile (13 settlement profiles)

• Monrovia City Profile (10 settlement profiles)
• New Georgia LGA Profile (15 settlement profiles)
• New Kru Town LGA Profile (22 settlement profiles)
• Gardnersville LGA Profile (11 settlements)

Savings groups are the building blocks of all SDI federations. Federations throughout the network know that savings groups do more than collect money – they collect people and build a critical mass. When the savings groups are networked, federations are born. During phase one of this project, the Liberian federation, Liberian Urban Poor Savers (FOLUPS), has achieved:

• 272 savings groups spanning 61 communities
• 7,991 members (F: 6,979 M: 1,012)

As can be seen from the savings group data above, close to 90% of members are women. Throughout the SDI network, women’s membership and leadership are prioritized as a deliberate strategy for building the voice of women and nurturing a culture of dialogue, collective priority-setting, peer support, trust, and collaboration. Savings groups offer a safe space for women to learn and grow their leadership capacities and go on to combat the structural exclusion of women’s voices in urban governance. In Liberia, women federation members led clean-up exercises identified as priority action during the settlement forums. The women report that this federation effort increased compliance with community resolutions to improve environmental sanitation and the active participation of slum dwellers in the regular community meetings and clean-up exercises.

Once we realized most of the profilers, enumerators and forum facilitators were men, we made a special effort to increase the participation and leadership of women and youth through hands-on learning-by-doing, including setting benchmarks for female participation

An imminent threat of eviction led the federation to prioritize household enumeration of Monrovia’s oldest and largest informal settlement, West Point. Day in day out, the federation – dressed in bright red Know Your City bibs and gumboots – trekked from house to house administering the enumeration questionnaire and mobilizing federation members. Peers from other federations in the SDI network supported the Liberians in this effort as part of a learning-by-doing exchange. Snapshots from the enumeration report are shown below as well as additional research (Younghyun Kim 2017) on West Point’s risk profile undertaken in partnership with the federation using the enumeration data.

Keep an eye out for the full Monrovia profile report and West Point Enumeration Report, due to be launched in the coming months.

Transformation begins: city-wide profiling and mapping in Monrovia