Voices for Peace

On September 18th Plan launched in Ireland and one of the speakers at the official launch, talking about Plan's work in the field, was Chernor Bah. Chernor, 18, a representative from a Plan supported child rights organisation in Sierra Leone was in Europe for a youth forum organised by the World Bank.  His presence in Dublin proved inspirational to friends and supporters of Plan Ireland and gave us the chance to ask him about the situation in his country - we have heard a lot about children and war, but what about children and peace?

Chernor is the President of the Children's Forum Network (CFN), an organisation that lobbies hard for children's voices to be heard in his country. "In Sierra Leone", says Chernor, "the issue of child participation is crucial, children suffered disproportionately during the war, they need to gain in the same way from the peace".

For 10 years of civil war people, particularly the young, were denied a platform and Chernor is convinced that it was this sort of repression that led to war in the first place, force was used in place of dialogue and, as he says, "grievances came out of a gun". 

The Children's Forum Network who have groups of activists all over the country are determined to make their government take children's issues on board and really listen to them. They have much to contribute in re-building the country; they are after all the country's future.  Sierra Leone now has a minister for Children's Affair and CFN puts a lot of pressure on him, acting as an advisory group, pushing issues that they all feel strongly about.

The main issue in the country is education and, with the aim of quality education for all in mind, the Children's Forum Network took on the issue of child labour and have been instrumental in making it illegal for children to work in mines. They also focus on running peace education in schools and in bringing the issues of HIV/Aids out into the open. CFN is present in 45 schools all over the country and can draw on an enormous body of support for their campaigning and lobbying activities.

In Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, CFN also runs a radio station. Chernor sees radio as crucial in the job of rebuilding the country, "in Sierra Leone you have young people who have lost trust and hope, their problems have proved too big for them to carry". For him radio is the only means of communicating a positive message of hope and of reviving communities destroyed by years of war.

It is not only a way of reaching young people, who provide the content and an audience for the radio station, but also of restoring pride, "my child is on the radio today", and raising the status of children in the community. The radio provides crucial information to people starved of education, and of basic links with the outside world, in areas where many people are illiterate and have little access to television. 

Radio can campaign about HIV/AIDS, provide maths lessons and agricultural information and, for Chernor most importantly, provide a platform for young people to be heard, and for them to be educated in their rights and responsibilities.  He mentions that in other parts of West Africa radio "is having a phenomenal effect." 

In fact Plan has been facilitating children's radio projects in West Africa since 1995. In 2000 its children's radio campaign from Senegal "I'm a child but I have my rights too!" won the silver world medal at the New York Festivals in the children/young adults programmes category and it has gradually expanded into several other countries. It is this work that Plan has been asked to build on in the Moyamba District of Sierra Leone where there is at the moment limited access to radio.

Plan already works in Moyamba, in the southern province of Sierra Leone, and, in meetings with the community and other local partners it was decided that MODCAR, Moyamba District Children's Awareness Radio, would be a crucial tool in the rehabilitation of the area. The radio station is very much a community-based initiative. Local people will provide the labour to build the station and be the driving force behind the content. 

The station will serve the diverse needs of the community - for agricultural information, for economic regeneration and education in its many forms, and for the re-integration into the community of the "new civilians", the ex-combatants who are a growing proportion of the population. Much of the content will be provided by and targeted at children and young people.

Chernor and the children he represents in the CFN are convinced that real participation from all sections of society in the country's future is the only way to secure a lasting, and eventually prosperous, peace. A radio station is probably not many people's idea of a crucial need in a country like Sierra Leone whose infrastructure and ability to feed and house its people has been severely undermined, but, talking to Chernor really brings home the role that radio can play.  In Moyamba it will complement other work being done to rebuild and rehabilitate in the aftermath of war. In the urban areas radio is already inspiring young people, uniting communities and providing crucial information.