Good Evening:

It is a wonderful opportunity for me to here with you tonight.  I am delighted by the efforts of institutions such as Skidmore College and the World Awareness Children’s Museum for granting you this privilege to participate in constructive conversations about the militarization of boys, a situation affecting thousands of your peers around the world, some of whom are child soldiers in rag-tag militias and vigilante forces.  According to Child Soldiers Internatio...

In a region of extreme poverty and underdevelopment, religious occasions such as Ramadan and Christmas are usually the only times that most people enjoy the joy of life rightly embedded in these festivities. Christmas and Ramadan in Sierra Leone are not only about the religious meanings of these events; they are also a social opportunity for the haves to share with the have-nots, for families to reconcile their differences, and for neighbours to entertain each other through parties an...

The ebola emergency in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia has led these countries to temporarily close schools in order to manage the spread of the disease. It has been estimated that the closure of schools affects estimably five million children in the region, and fears that some of these children might not return to school after the emergency have caused some NGOs to call for the reopening of schools in the region. As founder of the Jeneba Project Inc. and someone who has provi...

One of the greatest pleasures of traveling around the U.S. on public transportation to give presentations and attend fundraisers for the Jeneba Project Inc., a nonprofit I founded to provide educational opportunities to the children of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea after more than a decade of civil war in that region, is the privilege of talking to ordinary Americans about these countries and the work we do. In my experience, when Americans are interested in an issue, they a...

The question of limited girls’ education in Sierra Leone is not an issue of misogyny as experienced in other parts of the world; it is mostly about pragmatic investment in a poor and underdeveloped country. Like every shrewd investment, poverty often forces parents to make hard choices concerning their children’s education. Most Sierra Leonean parents understand the value of education and would like both their boys and girls to go to school; however, the economic realities many parents fa...