WADE IN PICTURES
openDemocracy •

When child traffickers work across West Africa’s borders, activists need help to do the same

This article is part of an editorial partnership with the Fund for Global Human Rights.

A fifteen-year-old girl gets pregnant and runs away from her highly religious family in Guinea to escape punishment. She ends up in the hands of traffickers and on the streets of Freetown, Sierra Leone, engaged in the sex trade. She is arrested and charged with loitering by the police and put behind bars.

Defence for Children International-Sierra Leone worked to get her out of jail and into a safe home wher

Liberia’s Working Women Plagued by Sexual Assault and Harassment – New Narratives

Vera was working for an NGO when a supervisor made sexual advances while the two were in his office. She remembers worrying she would not be strong enough to push him away.

“He asked me to stand up and said ‘Kiss me’. I said no, then I tried to get up. He pulled me to him and tried to lift up my blouse,“ Vera says. “I remember pulling my blouse down and I remember physical strength from him,” she says.

Years later, sitting at a desk at her own small, private clinic, Vera, now in her 30s, says

“I Am Gay” The First Liberian Homosexuals to Talk to the Media Say Life is Hard – New Narratives

Names in this article have been changed to conceal the identities of gay persons mentioned.

Jerome, 16, strides like he is a supermodel on a runway. He has a slender body, and his hair is cut short. The fashionable teen is wearing denim jeans. A white polo T-shirt bathed in dragon designs reveals his bare chest. From his slippers peek red painted toenails.

The soft-spoken teen gestures with his hands nervously. He is full of suspicion of his surroundings. Jerome says he is gay, a realization t
Public Radio International •

Liberia’s elections, ritual killings and cannibalism

A candidate for Liberia's Senate and a former county attorney are among those standing trial for the 2009 murder, the latest in a long history of ritual sacrifices performed for political power in Liberia.

In this case in southeastern Maryland County, prosecutors were tipped off by a witch doctor who provided a list of 18 people allegedly connected to the killing, including Fulton Yancy, the former county attorney, and President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's Special Envoy and Ambassador-at-Large Dan
Public Radio International •

Liberia president faces a tough second term

An acrimonious election campaign against the main opposition party, Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), was capped off by violence on the eve of the runoff and a CDC poll boycott.

Liberia has not been more tense since the end of the civil war eight years ago that left 250,000 people dead.

Johnson Sirleaf has a series of challenges ahead as she attempts to continue the reconstruction and reconciliation started in her first term.

The biggest challenge is unemployment, which is stuck at a stag

Opinion | In the Grip of Ebola

The next thing we knew, the number of cases, and of deaths, was swelling. They are now in the hundreds. But the government strictly warned journalists not to go near an Ebola case. “I beg you,” the health minister, Walter Gwenigale, warned us at a news conference, “don’t get contaminated by trying to do investigative reporting by going near people that may be sick. We will give you the information.”

But the effect was to quarantine information about the disease, rather than spread information a
the Guardian •

Families left haunted by Liberia’s Ebola crematorium

Brian Lomax, 26, sleeps on a pile of bones – the remains of cremated Ebola victims whose relatives may never get the chance to collect.

He was hounded out of his community by neighbours who feared his work at the Margibi crematorium in Boys Town, Lower Margibi county, was helping to spread the disease rather than contain it. This is the only place he has left to go.

Lomax is just one of many Liberians whose lives have been altered by the cremations at Margibi, which came to an end in December