When I moved to Sierra Leone in 2007 the non-profit space was not just saturated, it was very White. NGOs were synonymous with expatriates but what was worrisome was their leadership structure. Local staff was predominantly at the bottom. While NGOs from the global North still get the bulk of donor funds in Sierra Leone (either as implementing partners (doing the work in place of govt) or direct budget support) there is a small but noticeable shift of local women driving change from the front.

Over the past decade, Sierra Leonean women have emerged with innovative solutions for local challenges. For this International Women’s Day we must #breakthebias not just as it relates to gender but also the bias that prevents organizations led and founded by women from the global South from accessing the resources they need to scale their impact. 

Here are five social impact leaders doing amazing work in Sierra Leone whose organizations deserve your support this year.

1. Peagie Foday, PW Scholarship Fund 

Peagie has spent the past decade destigmatizing teen pregnancy in Sierra Leone. Through her foundation, she has provided hundreds of scholarships for girls who would otherwise become dropouts after giving birth. Beyond that, she runs several daycare centers for children of teen moms so that these vulnerable teens have safe places to leave their kids when they go back to school. On the one hand, she is responsible for re-enrolling teenage moms in school and making child care and early learning available to their children. I mean what more can I say but bow! 

2. Yakama Manty Jones, Yak Jones Foundation

Yakama collects used paper from local businesses so kindergarteners in Sierra Leone will have access to notebooks. For the past six years, she has created and donated mini-libraries to schools educating children from low-resource communities. In schools that don’t have the resources but where there is a need she provides them with reading coaches to help early learners get a head start developing their literacy skills.  In many cases, the picture books she donates are the first copies of books that the recipients have ever known. She isn’t just donating books, she is making sure kids can read them.

3. Janice Williams, Sudu

Janice saw Sierra Leone’s broken informal foster system that makes it easy for child trafficking and abuse and said not on my watch. She finds safe families willing to foster children. Before she places a child with a family they are vetted both with a medical exam, and they must provide recommendations. Once her org places children with the families they conduct spot checks too. They also make sure each family gets child support. No child placed with a foster family has ever been harmed or run away. Janice is on a mission to protect orphans and safeguard orphans. 

4. Mariama Kamara, Smiling Through Light

Mariama saw how rural traders struggled to trade at night and decided that they needed access to clean sustainable energy. She makes it possible for women to leave dangerous kerosene tin lamps for solar lamps. Her startup sells solar lamps to market women on credit allowing them to lease and later own. Not just that, she has also created clean energy jobs for women and youth. When she is not at the frontlines with her team engaging traditional community leaders about the benefits of solar, she is advocating for energy access for rural women on global platforms. 

5. Bidemi Carrol, The Learning Foundation

Bidemi is on a mission to change learning outcomes in Sierra Leone by providing teachers with the skills they need to support early learners from the first to third grade. Through training of trainers her org coaches teachers in proven techniques to help children learn to read. They use bottle stoppers, books, phonemes, alliteration, whatever allows teachers who love to teach to get better at it. She is also equipping and building libraries in schools and communities to create safe dedicated spaces for learning and exploration. In the libraries supported by her org, 70% of students have borrowed a book or accessed a learning resource.

If you’ve read this far thank you! Happy International Women’s Day! The best way to empower, and celebrate these women (and everything else this day is supposed to achieve) is to support the things that matter to these women.