Giving a Voice to All Citizens

This past week I was able to attend and support two activities aimed at strengthening democracy through giving a voice to those who are usually not heard: Hard-to-reach youth in the cities and community members on the countryside. An effective democratic system and sustainable peace depend on the inclusion of all groups of society in the political deliberation and decision-making process, those who are marginalized as much as the elite. This is even more crucial in a post-conflict country such as Liberia where the society is still divided and efforts toward reconciliation are only just starting.

The first activity I joined was a roundtable with twenty-two youths (defined in Liberia as anyone between 18 and 35 years of age) who are ex-combatants, sex workers, drug addicts, and other hard-to-reach persons. In order to draft a youth mainstreaming strategy that will be used by various civil society organizations (CSOs), it was decided that a special event would be dedicated to listening to the concerns of these young adults – concerns that are not captured when only talking to youth in schools or other institutions. Common problems voiced were poor access to health care, especially when it comes to reproductive health, illiteracy and a lack of means to pay for vocational training, rape and the ineffective ways rape cases are dealt with, high rates of criminality, as well as drug and alcohol abuse. In a second step, the participants discussed which services for young people exist in their communities, why they do or do not make use of them, and what their recommendations are to CSOs and to the government to change the situation of young adults like themselves.

Besides granting me a unique opportunity to listen to the stories of these young people and hearing about their day-to-day challenges, taking part in the preparation and implementation of the roundtable also taught me about organizing events in a way that is sensitive to the participants: Should we take notes on a flipchart at all if some of the participants are illiterate? Should people introduce themselves only by first name in order to protect their identities? How can we paraphrase our questions into simple English and still capture the nuances that we aim for? This led to some practical implications for me that I do not experience at events with other populations like helping out in writing name tags for all so they didn’t have to say whether they could write or not, temporarily baby-sitting (a young woman brought her infant with her – almost all of the young women had several children already), and mostly practicing my skills in understanding Liberian English. It was amazing to see how the facilitators gained the trust of the participants, how the young men and women opened up to share their stories, and how even a clearly desperate drug-addicted woman engaging in prostitution started to smile when my colleague turned to hear her story and show empathy instead of judgment. The most vocal of the boys, a former combatant in the civil war, thanked the organizers at the end of the workshop in such a heartfelt way that the entire group cheered and sent us away with smiles and waving hands.

The second activity was a two-day training for community radio station managers and operators to support them in using a SMS technology that is linked to their radio stations. The radios can conduct opinion polls with the listeners sending their answers in through SMS that are free of charge. Practically everyone in Liberia owns a cell phone thus making participation in such polls available to all. The opinion polls can for example be used to survey what people’s priorities are for the use of the development fund that is allocated to the counties, how they think crime and violence should best be dealt with in their communities, or who they would vote for in the next elections. Next to the opinion polls, listeners can send in complaints, for example about weather-induced destruction of houses and roads, rape cases, or incidents of corruption that they witness. When the complaints reach the radio station, the host can broadcast the information, pass it on to the relevant authorities, or bring the issue up in other radio programs so as to raise awareness. Through this technology, a listener living on the Liberian countryside informed one of the participating community radios about the destruction of several houses through a rainstorm, and members of the Red Cross who had listened to the radio show rushed to help rebuild the village. Hopefully, the more widespread use of this SMS-to-radio system can lead to many more of those successes – making it easier for citizens to communicate their concerns with each other and with the relevant authorities and to voice their opinions on issues relevant to the development and governance of their communities. Simple technology can be a powerful tool to involve more people in decision-making processes and to amplify their voices so that the concerns and ideas of as many citizens as possible are entering the political debate.