Helping Liberian women
WAR and Ebola have devastated Liberia, but one woman has her eye on space to help improve lives in her country.
Saran Jones and her family fled 20 years ago when she was 8. She has been back for 10 years, working hard to spare some African women the 40 billion hours of walking to access clean water.
Jones returned to her home intent on improving education, launching the Fund a Child’s Education (Face) Africa organisation. But the focus changed from schools and classrooms when she identified a more immediate problem.
“I realised that the lack of clean water prevented children from getting to school,” Jones said at the World Economic Forum Africa in Durban. “So my focus has shifted to getting 100% access to all of Liberia.”
She said she was inspired by a session hosted by Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor that brainstormed the use of satellite images in urban and rural planning, agriculture and security.
Pandor said space technology could provide huge benefits from relatively small costs.
For Jones, the idea of an eye in space providing data in a municipality in Liberia where she is installing water infrastructure, would mean saving ages of door-to-door information gathering. One of her main goals is to spare women having to walk to collect water so they can use that time for other economic activities. So, she organised pumps to be installed closer to their homes.
Jones found returning to her war-ravaged homeland 20 years after fleeing, depressing. “We had lived an upper middle-class life,” she said.
“My father was a university professor and my mother was a successful businesswoman. I went to a good Catholic school.”
She said the country was “exactly as it had been portrayed” in television coverage of the civil war they saw from their homes in exile in the US, Ivory Coast and Egypt.
Now the country is considered safe enough for the UN peacekeeping presence to be downsized at the end of the year.
“It will be a true test of confidence in the military and police to take over from them,” she said, adding that the war years had left Liberia with a lost generation of young people with little education or vocational training.
Many were child soldiers during the war and not yet fully integrated into society.
Jones and her Jamaican husband have adopted two children who had been orphaned by the Ebola epidemic as many Liberian families have done, limiting the number of childheaded households.
October will see an election that will mark the first handover of power from one democratically-elected president to another, Jones said.
“Ellen Johnson Sirleaf inherited a lot (of disadvantages since she was elected in 2006). A post-conflict president is very different from another. She took on a huge burden and a challenge.”
Although the post-war Ebola crisis is over, the country is not yet out the woods, psychologically, she said.
“Two weeks ago there was a scare when 12 people died mysterious deaths.
“The first thing on people’s minds was Ebola but it turned out to be something else.”