Posts by Marcus

The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), a special consultant to the UN Economic and Social Council, has issued a warning in the wake of the contentious, and potentially unconstitutional, sacking of the Vice President of Sierra Leone, Alhaji Sam-Sumana. There are various factors at play, but the most threatening and sticky claim made against…

Schools are open, but attendance is low. There are several things affecting the cautious and slow return to school for Sierra Leone’s youngsters. Roeland Monasch, Unicef’s Sierra Leone representative, who described the reopening of the country’s 8,000 schools as “a major step in the normalisation of life”, but Alison Schafer, World Vision’s mental health and…

With new Ebola cases having steadied at around 1-2 per day, the President, Ernest Bai Koroma, and the Ministry of Education have decided that it is now time to re-open schools in Sierra Leone. Whilst this is a huge morale boost for the nation, and a significant step forwards, we are still facing a very…

One cornerstone of our mission, and something that EducAid has always been immensely proud of, is being an intrinsically Sierra Leonean organisation, and being cemented in the centre of our communities. From the very inception of the charity we committed to establishing our roots in Sierra Leone – not to fall in to the trap…

  It is from the generosity of so many that we are able to continue our efforts in Sierra Leone, and can deliver such needed change in a country with so little amongst its general population. EducAid is not just a network of schools that provide education, we also provide the residential and pastoral care…

Dr. John Wright is one of the first NHS volunteers who travelled to Sierra Leone to help fight Ebola. He was a part of the founding team at the Ebola Treatment Centre at Moyamba Junction. During his time in Sierra Leone, Dr. Wright recorded the events and experiences; in this article I have transcribed some…

The Médecins Sans Frontières report, issued this week, gives us an insight in to the early stages of the Ebola outbreak. As the organisation that first flagged the scale of the Ebola health crisis, the MSF is in a strong position to critique the international and domestic response from the outset. The MSF acknowledges, “it…

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) released a report this week to coincide with the 1st anniversary of the Ebola outbreak. One year on from the first confirmed case in Guinea I wanted to give a brief update on the situation in Sierra Leone, and to outline the next steps for the quick and comprehensive eradication of…

As a nation the UK has traditionally been very generous when it comes to donating money to help those in need, both domestically and internationally. According to a Charities Aid Foundation report on private donations, at 0.9% GDP the UK is second in charitable giving only to the U.S.A. Combine this figure with the amount…

Over the past few months, the crew of the RFA Argus have been supporting EducAid in a variety of ways. The ship performs several functions but it’s main role is the Primary Casualty Receiving Ship for the Royal Navy; with state of the art medical facilities it is deployed to provide medical cover for all…

If you have been following the blog closely for the past few months, you will have noticed a continuing theme that runs through all of the accounts coming from Sierra Leone. Every individual that we have interviewed in our ‘Living with Ebola’ series has raised teenage pregnancy as one of the major concerns in the…

A deeply concerning report was published in the papers last week; it centred on the publication of an audit report of the management of Ebola funds in Sierra Leone. The Audit Service Sierra Leone (ASSL) had published the report about the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) and National Ebola Response Centre’s (NERC) management of…

Vanessa Mason has long been involved with EducAid. It was her son, Swithun Mason, and James Boardman that were struck by the plight of the Sierra Leoneans, and compelled to help by setting up what is now the charity, EducAid. Since it’s inception Vanessa has always supported the charity, and those most centrally involved. Indeed,…

At EducAid we have been devoted to improving the lives of Sierra Leoneans through the provision of top quality education for nearly two decades. We often speak of the value of education to these young people who so often don’t have access to anything, but it is a difficult thing to encapsulate in words. Those…

Coventry City Football Club announced recently that they were commencing an exciting initiative to help orphans in Sierra Leone. Towards the end of last year Miriam visited a small village in a rural part of Sierra Leone called Kigbal. The plight of the town was covered in a video by the BBC journalist Andrew Harding,…

In the first part of this post we outlined the societal rationale that posits Sierra Leonean women lower than the men. This belief is the product of a lack of access to education, for both men and women, but also of the lower expectations of women held by both sexes. While it is difficult to…

Gender equality has been a central pillar of EducAid’s mission since the charity’s inception. In a country with so many social, economic, political, and infrastructural problems, the intricate challenge of confronting this delicate problem is difficult to approach. There is a social mind shift that needs to occur in Sierra Leone, but much of the…

Suma, our site coordinator for EducAid Rogbere, met with Remy Watt. Remy is a strong woman and the eldest in the Rogbere community. This is Suma’s telling of her story: “I was living with my family in Rogbere when I first heard about EducAid. It seemed so far away at first. We seemed very isolated…

Few things illustrate the impact of our school’s education greater than the existence of our Quality Enhancement Programmes, the QEP & QEPM. Sierra Leonean schools from around the country request EducAid to run these in-depth training courses. In the programme for Junior Secondary Schools (QEP), and for Primary Schools (QEPM) our team trains teachers, principles…