Liberia

Through its groundbreaking Inform Women, Transform Lives campaign, The Carter Center partners with city leaders worldwide to raise awareness about women’s right to access information and to help cities reach women with valuable information and essential municipal services. 

Access to this information empowers women with a stronger voice, enabling them to participate in public life, utilize public services, and make more informed decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities. In Liberia, this project has partnered with the city of Monrovia.

How It Started

During Liberia’s 2017 presidential and legislative elections, The Carter Center supported the Liberia Election Observation Network (LEON), an umbrella civil society organization that deploys citizen observers.

Our Work and Methods

• With Carter Center support, LEON deployed observers to all 73 of Liberia’s electoral districts for the 2017 elections.
• After 2017, the Center continued to work with LEON to gather and share information about governmental issues, encourage citizen engagement, build confidence in government, and support peaceful electoral processes.

Impacts

• LEON has filled an important void in Liberia by bringing together a broad range of voices and deploying well-trained election observers across the country for the first time in the country’s history. It:
  • Advocates for electoral reform
  • Observes legislative by-elections
  • Monitors the legislative branch to improve transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement
  • Conducts surveys and discussion groups to ensure citizen input on legislative and government programs
  • Monitors the effects of social media on Liberia’s democracy
• In 2024, LEON successfully transitioned to a fully independent entity.

The Carter Center’s involvement in Liberia’s elections dates to 1996, when, after five years of civil war, government and opposition leaders forged a tenuous peace agreement and invited us to observe their upcoming election.

President Carter led that election observation mission in 1997. The electoral process went smoothly, but the winner failed to uphold his promise to improve human rights and governance, and within a few years, the country plunged back into civil war.

Chaos continued until August 2003, when a new comprehensive peace agreement was signed. And when elections were held in July 2005, we again deployed an international election observation mission.

We went on to observe elections in 2011, in 2017 — when the country saw its first transition from one democratically elected president to another in more than 70 years — and in 2023.

More information about all of these elections is available in our reports section.

The Carter Center has worked to foster peace and democracy in Liberia since March 1991. The Center’s Monrovia office opened in 1992, closed during full-scale fighting in 1996, and reopened to observe the 1997 presidential election.

Our Work and Methods

• President Carter and Center staff worked with regional mediators to help them reach several peace agreements, the final one of which led to the special elections of 1997.
• At the same time, working with Liberian partners and the Institute for Multitrack Diplomacy, the Center also established LIPCORE, a group of potential peacemakers representing many different warring factions.
• In 1998, the Center began a multifaceted democracy and governance program that:
  • Established an independent printing press, owned and operated cooperatively by Liberia’s media houses under the nonprofit corporation Free Press Inc.
  • Developed training programs for Liberian journalists
  • Strengthened and expanded the Justice and Peace Commission’s rural offices to train human rights monitors and paralegals
  • Provided financial and technical support for Liberian human rights nongovernmental organizations
  • Monitored the political and human rights situation in Liberia

Impacts

• In September 2000, widespread human rights abuses led the Center to close its Monrovia office. At the time, President Carter wrote in a letter to President Charles Taylor that the Liberian government’s actions since 1997 had created an environment that thwarted efforts to strengthen the new democracy and advance human rights.
• After the Monrovia office closed, President Carter and the Center continued to speak out on human rights abuses in Liberia.
• In 2002, the Center’s Conflict Resolution Program met with the Liberian government and opposition leaders to discuss possible moves toward peace talks under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States in Abuja, Nigeria. While those talks were not immediately fruitful, the departure of Charles Taylor eventually led to new, democratic elections in 2005.

How It Started

Recognizing the importance of the right of access to information in post-conflict Liberia, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf signed the nation’s first Freedom of Information law in September 2010. In advance of the law’s historic passage, our Global Access to Information Program, as it was then known, was invited to support the process of establishing an access to information system in Liberia.

Our Work and Methods

• Beginning in 2009, the Center helped nonprofits, media, government, and the Independent Information Commission understand the law’s implementation, oversight, enforcement, and use.
• Later, we conducted a study of barriers facing women trying to access information and convened stakeholders to develop recommendations for overcoming the obstacles.

Impacts

The Center worked with key partners to implement solutions to help ensure that meaningful information is reaching everyone, particularly women.

How It Started

At the end of the civil war in 2003, Liberia’s justice system was in ruins. Reestablishing the rule of law was a critical element of Liberia’s postwar reconstruction, but the country had few resources to invest in strengthening and enhancing the effectiveness and integrity of legal and judicial institutions. In 2006, The Carter Center was invited to help build a system to ensure justice for all Liberian citizens.

Our Work and Methods

The Center’s Access to Justice Project partnered with the Ministry of Justice to:

• Identify critical needs, particularly focusing on historically marginalized rural communities.
• Develop and implement civic education messages. For justice to be served, citizens first must understand and exercise their rights.
• Fill immediate short-term gaps to strengthen the formal justice system. This included not only basic support, such as the provision of internet connectivity, but also direct legal assistance.

Impacts

Over time, this innovative project expanded, partnering with government and civil society to deliver sustained impact.

The village chiefs we trained in conflict management helped resolve disputes and changed practices and attitudes about the law and the roles of women and youth.

• The program worked with the Ministry of Justice to:
  • Develop a unit devoted to sexual and gender-based violent crimes
  • Design a training manual and standard operating procedures for prosecutors
  • Strengthen the public defender’s office
• Through community-level outreach and extensive educational programming on national and local radio, rural citizens learned how to exercise their rights, which is important because as a community’s legal knowledge increases, conflict levels decrease.
• The village chiefs we trained in conflict management helped resolve disputes and changed practices and attitudes about the law and the roles of women and youth.

How It Started

Devastating civil conflicts from 1989 through 1997 and 2001-2003 took a toll on Liberia and its health system. Increasing mental health and psychosocial challenges throughout the country, misconceptions, and stigma around mental illnesses — and the resulting discrimination — further intensified a mental health crisis. In 2010, building upon nearly two decades of the Carter Center’s efforts consolidating peace and democracy in Liberia, the Mental Health Program launched an initiative to help address this pervasive challenge.

Our Work and Methods

The Carter Center’s goal was to create a sustainable public mental health system capable of mitigating the impact of future crises on mental health and psychosocial well-being. Primary activities included:

• Helping the Ministry of Health develop and implement a national mental health policy and strategic plan (2016-2021)
• Working with the government during the COVID-19 pandemic on strategies to reduce acute stress or exacerbated mental health problems associated with lockdowns and quarantines
• Training nurses, midwives, and physicians’ assistants as mental health clinicians

Impacts

• Recognizing a care gap for children and adolescent mental health, the program expanded the scope of workforce training to improve services and enabling environments where children grow and learn.
• The program developed a cadre of child and adolescent mental health clinicians, trained teachers and school administrators to identify social, emotional, and behavioral problems and promote positive learning and development, and incorporated neuroscience into teacher education.
• The Carter Center played an active role supporting and promoting mental health during and following the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in Liberia. The program:
  • Educated first responders on self-care and stress relief
  • Trained health workers and social workers on psychological first aid
  • Conducted community healing dialogues with Ebola-affected villages
  • Supported the creation of peer support groups for people with mental illnesses and epilepsy