The Freetown City Council (FCC). the United Nations Capital Development (UNCDF) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), together with their implementing partners, has launched the “Women for Water and Peace” (W4WP) Project at the New City Hall in Freetown.
The project is funded by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund.
Through a community-led approach, the project seeks to empower young women from the communities to become agents of change through supporting the construction and management of twenty-five (25) water kiosks with solar-powered purification systems. The water kiosks will provide accessible, clean water for the first time to many of Freetown’s most vulnerable communities in a conflict-sensitive manner. Young women will be empowered to operate the kiosks as businesses and become agents of change and peace.
Speaking on the timeliness of this intervention, Her Worship the Mayor of Freetown. Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr OBE said that “access to water represents one of the most pervasive challenges affecting women and girls in informal communities. We have had reports of children leaving home before daybreak to cover long distances whilst seeking water for their families. which puts them at risk of injury as well as gender-based violence and sexual exploitation.”
Through this project, women and girls will learn to take leadership roles in preventing and managing conflicts associated with water scarcity in their communities. This way, the project will simultaneously contribute to reducing conflict drivers, enhancing social cohesion, and empowering women and girls.
If adequately capacitated, women can play a major rote in conflict resolution in the communities,” highlights the Director of the ILO Office for Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Vanessa Phala. She further explains that, “as key users of water sources and contributors to household decision-making, women can actively engage in economic activities along the water value chain and mitigate resource related conflicts through community-based dialogue.”
“Over the last two years, UNCDF and Freetown City Council have been working closely with communities in Freetown to improve access to water through our innovative financing solutions under the Blue Peace Financing Initiative. During these engagements with communities, we identified several dimensions to the water crisis in the city, especially the challenges faced by women and girls in Sierra Leone who in most households, carry the sole responsibility of fetching water for their homes. Therefore, we decided to partner with ILO to apply for this grant to address these challenges,” Christel Alvergne, UNCDF West and Central Africa Regional Coordinator, notes. By increasing the availability of clean water in an inclusive manner, the project will reduce the scarcity — a. the associated tension — around access to clean water. In addition, this project will address structural gender inequalities in two ways. First, it empowers local women a. adolescent girls with decent livelihoods through the operations of the water kiosks. Also, it positions them as agents of change and controllers of water access: levelling the power imbalance with men, who currently control the limited available water resour.s and wield the accompanying economic power. By positioning women as community leaders, the project aimsl prevailing gender-based violence in the target communities, which is often closely interlinked with the current issues around lack of access to clean water.
The project will be implemented in partnership with the Federation for Urban and Rural Poor (FEDURP), Institute of Legal Research a. Advocacy for Justice (ILRAJ), West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), Sierra Leone Labour Congress a. SArra Leone Employers’ Federation.
-We have carefully selected the partners, and each partner brings a unique capacity which we think will add tremendous value to the service delivery. And so, we are excited to pool together this broad range of capabilities in Sierra L.ne and channel efforts toward building peace within the country,- comments Wycliffe Ngwabe, UNCDF Country Lead.
The project commenced in January 2022 and will be implemented over 18 months in five (5) wards, which include Ward 401 – Mayinkineh, Ward 408 – Rokupa. Ward 435 – Dworzak. Ward 442 – Lumley, and Ward 443 – Crab Town.
