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Five years ago, Liberia was in a fight for its life.  The small West African country threw everything it had in its health systems at the dreaded Ebola virus disease. By the time the epidemic was over, more than 11,000 people in the tri-state region of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia had died. Still based in Monrovia, Kamal Anisiobi writes about the impact of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic. S uch is the severity of the situation that the President of Liberia George Manneh Weah saw it fit to drop an awareness song , sang by himself and other Liberian artists, to let his people know about this new fast-killing virus and ways of preventing it. Weah hopes to appeal to the nation of some 4.5 million people to ensure COVID-19 does not spread. Unfortunately,  Environment Protection Agency Executive Director, Dr. Nathaniel Blamah was confirmed to be the first to test positive with COVID-19, the disease associated with the new strain of the coronavirus, after he recently retu...

On Women's Day 2020, enjoy this archive photo of Haja Zainab Hawa Bangura and a group of Sierra Leonean women as you celebrate the day. Currently, Zainab is the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi. She was appointed by the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in December 2018.

Hannah Iyatunde Abigail Deen (of blessed memory) was a native from Sierra Leone, born in January 1938. As a young woman growing up, she was always determined to work in a hospital as a caregiver and when all the applications she made to acquire a scholarship failed, Hannah could still not bring herself to stop believing in her dreams. Years later,  she got married and started a beautiful family. She later joined an organisation in Freetown to help the aged, after her children were all grown up. She worked there for many years until she passed away in August 2019. However, her dedication to serving humanity did not die along with her. Lango Deen Sankoh, her eldest daughter founded an organization called Hannah Deen for Social Care or Hannah for Social Care in her memory. Today, Friday the 31st of January 2020, Lango made a donation of Le4,000,000 to Kadijatu Bah, a Social Work Student at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, as a way to help foster her education, so that she...

George Soros announced the launch of a new university network at the 2020 World Economic Forum Meeting in Davos. The Open Society University Network (OSUN) aims to prepare students around the world for global challenges. Mr. Soros is endowing the academic network he has created with one billion dollars ($1 billion) and asking other philanthropists to contribute.  Over the past 30 years, Soros has given more than $32 billion to education and social justice causes.  “We are looking for farsighted partner institutions who feel a responsibility for the future of our civilization, people who are inspired by the goals of OSUN and want to participate in its realization,”  he said in a statement.  When OSUN begins this year, it will stretch from Bangladesh and Central Asia to the Palestinian territories, from South Africa to Colombia, and from leading universities and research institutes in Europe and the United States to  Syrian and Somali refugee camps. ...

In 2008, Angélique Kidjo visited a UNICEF-supported girls’ education project in Sierra Leone. The singer and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador spoke to a group of teenage girls in a village in Bombali District, northern Sierra Leone. The girls had dropped out of school due to problems related to child marriage and exploitation. "Your country needs doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers to take it forward,” Kidjo said at the event covered by Issa Davies . “And if I am here today, it is because I was determined to be educated.” A year before Angélique visited Sierra Leone, the singer-songwriter and activist was called "Africa's premier diva" by TIME magazine. In 2019, the BBC dubbed Angelique Kidjo “Queen Of African Music” after a performance at the Royal Albert Hall. It doesn't get any bigger than that. That's why in 2020, she has been billed as the "Daughter of Independence"  to celebrate the 60th independence anniversary of her native Benin and...

By our records, Yelibuya is probably the most-written-about town of the year. It really started more than a decade ago when a  picture of the island was posted on Panoramio, a photo-sharing website that was once used by Google to augment its Google Maps and Google Earth services. Apart from old British Admiralty nautical charts used by mariners, nothing much can be found on Yelibuya.  However, an article in Al Jazeera would change all that in August 2018 when it asked: " Why is this town in Sierra Leone sinking ?" Mara Kardas-Nelson, a journalist based in California, found that while there's no official government data in Sierra Leone on just how much the water is rising, the community estimates that the ocean has encroached inland at least 300 meters over the last 30 years. "As you can see, there is no method for protection. And it gets worse every year," one Yelibuya resident told Kardas-Nelson.  The same week, Face2Face Africa picked up the story u...

Over the past 12 months, 272 million people, representing 3.5% of the world's population, have been driven to seek a better future elsewhere. According to the UNESCO Director-General,  some are seeking new economic and employment opportunities, while others, such as refugees and asylum seekers, have been overwhelmed by their situation, and are fleeing war, persecution, hunger or disease.  Click here to read the full message .