“How Will The Future Generation Manage?” RIVERCESS, Liberia–A dispute is brewing here in the Gbarsaw Clan in this southeast county over a large portion of land being cultivated by the Managing Director of the National Port Authority (NPA), Bill Tweahway. Mr. Tweahway, who also hails from this town, has hired dozens of people from the…
New Narratives Fellow Anthony Stephens of Power TV/FM with the piece that prompted an uproar in the Liberian Senate. Legislators say Speaker Chambers is blocking legislation to establish a war and economic crimes court in Liberia. Watch the story here….
Poor economies of Liberia and Sierra Leonean since the end of civil wars have made it almost impossible for hundreds of thousands of ex-combatants to make a living, despite the large rehabilitation and reintegration programs run by the UN at the end of the conflicts. Many, whose fighting days left them ostracized from communities, and…
Finally this month a trial over war crimes will start on Liberian soil. It’s been 18 years since the end of the Liberian civil war and nine years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the country hold a war crimes court to bring those accused of directing the atrocities that left 250,000 dead to…
HENRY TOWN, Liberia and KENEMA, Sierra Leone – Ibrahim Sesay, a Sierra Leonean miner, never signed up to die when he crossed into Liberia in 2008 in search of greener pasture on mines in Korninga Chiefdom of Gbarpolu’s Bopolu District. A New Narratives cross-border investigation by Mae Azango and Emma Black in Sierra Leone and…
Kullie is one of thousands of Liberians who are still suffering as a result of shocking things that happened to them or what they saw happened to others during the war in Liberia. There are no recent statistics available but a 2008 study conducted five years after Liberia’s civil war ended by Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University, found that 40% of Liberians had symptoms of major depression and 44% appeared to have post-traumatic stress disorder….
NN’s Mae Azango and Prue Clarke write on the role of good journalism in breaking the taboo around female genital cutting in Liberia that led to its eventual ban for the Columbia Journalism Review. PRESIDENT ELLEN JOHNSON SIRLEAF left office in January with a tremendous, if overdue, parting gift for the girls of Liberia….
Moses Bailey started his journalism career in 2010 as a reporter at Radio Gbarnga. He continues to report for the station along with Bush Chicken and Local Voice. Moses has been a New Narratives fellow since 2017. In a project on the extractives sector Moses’s reporting forced the Bong County superintendent to admit he had…
If you’re going to the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Johannesburg please come and join us for the launch of “African Muckraking: 100 Years of African Investigative Journalism” edited by Anya Schiffrin, Anton Harber and George Lugalambi. The book features groundbreaking work by our Mae Azango, introduced by our Executive Director Prue Clarke and by Liberian journalist legend…
Monrovia – The new year will see two new training and reporting projects kick off for Liberia’s top journalists. The continuing collaboration between New Narratives Liberia and the Thomson Reuters Foundation will offer journalists the chance to learn about extractives industries and gain ongoing editorial and financial support to report on the mining, forestries, oil…
A Liberian journalist taking part in the Foundation’s Wealth of Nations programme has helped force a U-turn after he reported on dozens of students who had had their funding cut by Liberia’s national oil company, NOCAL. NOCAL hit the headlines in June 2015 when it suddenly announced it was close to bankruptcy. The story figured strongly…
Take part in our new project, run in collaboration with New Narratives, that supports Liberian journalists and news organizations in covering the country’s oil industry. The call for applications is now closed. Please read on for general information about the scheme. The project will run from 2015-16 and will feature training, mentoring and capacity building…
Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf President of the Republic of Liberia Executive Mansion Capitol Hill, Monrovia Republic of Liberia Dear President Sirleaf A year ago, you became only the second African head of state to endorse the Declaration of Table Mountain, which calls for the repeal of criminal defamation and “insult” laws throughout Africa. Now,…
MONROVIA, Liberia — LIBERIANS have begun calling the days between July 27 and Aug. 3 “the dark week” — 173 new Ebola virus cases and 94 new deaths. How much darker things may get is anybody’s guess. In Johnsonville, a swampy town outside Monrovia, three dozen corpses in body bags were dumped in shallow holes…
New Narratives is delighted to announce it has partnered with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the corporate charity of Thomson Reuters to run a project that supports Liberian journalists and news organizations to cover the country’s oil industry. The project will run from 2014-16 and will feature training, mentoring and capacity building for Liberian journalists and news organizations….
For the first time in Liberia a news outlet has built up enough credibility and trust that Liberians were willing to rise up to defend it. Perhaps I’ll be able to laugh one day when I look back at my time in a Liberian jail cell these last few months. In some ways it was…
NN’s Robtel Pailey joined a panel on Safety & Rule of Law with some of Africa’s heavyweights, as part of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation annual Forum, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Panelists included: Dr. Salid Ahmed Salim, former chair of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU); Trevor Manuel, minister in the South African cabinet; Jean Ping,…
Cestos City – Hannah Toe is in the twelfth grade class at Cestos High School in rural Rivercess County. She looks youthful with cornrows and a red flower headband in her hair matching her ruffled top, but she is 24 years old and already a mother, with a five-year-old son named Tony. Part 3 of…
Cestos City – Twelve-year-old Baby Girl Yarkah is in the first grade and attends the Upper Timbo Community School in Little Liberia, Rivercess County. She shares a small chair with another girl because there are not enough seats to accommodate the school’s 200 students. The chairs have no arms. There are no desks at all….
Cestos City – Students in Rivercess County are learning less than half of the curriculum each semester because of untrained teachers and a broken pay system that forces teachers to abandon schools for days, even weeks at a time. The first of a 3-part series on Liberia’s rural schools crisis by New Narratives fellow Mae…
