What we Do

The Mandela Toilets

John Koroma is a refugee living in the Mandela camp for internally displaced persons in Freetown; with poor sanitary arrangement.
Among these dangerous sanitations, there were 7 decrepit toilets that serve 1,000 people from which raw sewage flows down an open sewer in the middle of the street in front of John’s home.
John and his friends decisively took matters into their own hands; with $800 from a Youth-Led Development Funds from PCSL. They reconstructed the toilets and redirected the raw sewage through a 100m plastic pipe to the main Freetown sewer. John became a local hero and has a job with a local builder. That is Youth-Led Development – young people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and making a living and a future for themselves and their community.

2006 - read more

The Youth Forestry Project

The hillside opposite Lalokoh's village was once a rain - forest teeming with wildlife. Through his childhood, Kolokkah saw it being torn over, mostly to provide firewood for local people to cook with during the civil war. He has been planting trees since the age of ten and he has a talent for it. The community has given him space to create a seedling nursery and he created the youth Forestry and Development Association of young volunteers to help do his most ambitious project: to replant the denuded hillside he sees when he gets up every morning. With $500 from German Embassy through Peace Child, he has already planted 114,000 and will reach his target of 250,000 trees by the end of 2006.

The Firestone School Renovation

Joseph feels short-changed by his education. He feels that he could have passed the University Entrance Exam to move on to Fourah Bay College further up the hill behind his house, had he been to a better school. He was now determined to make the Firestone Community School, already a very good school, much better! So with the help of a small grant from the government of the Netherlands, he and his friends made room- dividers so that the different lesson groups in the large classroom can be screened off. They made simple desks and benches, painted a blackboard and bought better tools for the shoe-making and tailoring workshops. They built a new school toilet and piped in a new safe drinking water supply. They also installed a computer donated from the UK.

Ginger Hill Rehabilitation Center

Lasana Koroma leads a drug abuse counseling organization in the Ginger Hill neighborhood of Freetown. He has discovered that one of the best ways of rehabilitating young people who have been on drugs is to get out doing service projects -going around with wheel-barrows doing house-by-house garbage collection, cleaning streets etc. The logic is very simple; clean streets -clean bodies; no drugs, no prostitution, and no crime-healthy community. And the easiest place to start is by cleaning the streets and garbage-clogged drainage ways; these are especially dangerous as mosquitoes breed on the garbage and spread malaria causing many premature deaths. When the war came the work was stopped. With a grant from Peace Child Sierra Leone, Lasana has been able to buy new wheel-barrows and shovels. The work has started again, and several drug addicts have been brought back to normal life.

One such is Maurice, a 21 year old, former drug addict and child soldier. Working with Lasana he has completed 9th grade and will finish high school this year. Every day, he still jumps in sewers with other rehab students and hauls out the garbage. He feels he is building a better future for himself, his community and his country after years of contributing to only its devastation, bitterness and fear. Sierra Leone is full of people like Maurice; this project gave them new hope and a new, clean community at the same time. All they needed were the shovels and the wheelbarrows. They did the rest.