COVID-19 Community Awareness Campaign

Location: Sierra Leone (Freetown)

As cases keep rising everyday in Sierra Leone, adolescent boys and girls often face challenges during this period as a result of violence, malnutrition and economic challenges in some homes. As a youth-led organization focusing on advocating for vulnerable groups specifically women and girls, we believe that this category of people will be mostly affected during this pandemic across the globe and Sierra Leone is no exception.

Our organization experiences several operational challenges. One such challenge is in undertaking some of the planned initiatives to help our colleagues who live in the slums especially in the country’s capital Freetown, where majority of these adolescent boys and girls are staying with their poor families. As a youth group, we were motivated by the challenges we foresaw prior to the pandemic reaching the region. Challenges like, hunger, violence against women and girls and increased teenage pregnancy among school going girls as it was during the Ebola scourge in the country.

So far, we have been able to identify some of the target groups that we are now working with and we have also been able to partner with Civil Society groups like Health Alert in Freetown. We have also been able to engage these pupils in their respective communities across Freetown and we have written articles on how misinformation, panic and fear could cost us during this fight.

Finally, we build our work on partnerships as we believe the Covid-19 requires a united force in combating the virus. So far we are working with other CBO’s in ensuring correct information is been shared to the people.

Support

As a youth led organization, we are targeting 5000 people (women and girls specifically) to see how best we can provide them with dignity kits during and after the pandemic. Also we are planning a massive sensitization on the Covid-19 using a door-to-door approach and providing some of these homes with Veronica buckets, soap, hand sanitizers and tissues in major areas where the bulk of the communities frequently meet. So far, we have limited access to transportation services and limited megaphones.

In our recent meeting via WhatsApp, plans on how we can raise fund for some of these initiatives were discussed. We were able to draft a budget of $2000-$5000 in order to achieve these goals and contribute in the fight against the virus and help women and girls who are the most vulnerable during crisis. In other ways to raise these funds, we have established key partnerships with other organizations who are also seeking funds so that we can implement some of their activities in line with ours.

Other needs: Volunteers, Access to information

For more information contact covid19@unmgcy.org