By Amin Kef Sesay
Apparently, new approaches have to be deployed by the Government and its development partners to ensure access for the poor and most vulnerable to basic social services considered to be critical to the country’s sustainable long term development.
Access to basic social services still remains very limited in vast swathes of the country, particularly in the remote areas where developing agriculture and other profitable economic enterprises holds the answer to stemming the one-way traffic of young energetic Sierra Leoneans into Freetown and other urban cities where they are mostly unemployed or underemployed.
Families living in poor urban and remote rural areas lack access to essential services such as water and sanitation, health services, quality education for their children, and income-generating opportunities.
Many poor Sierra Leoneans suffer from poor hygiene practices, malnutrition, and food insecurity. Many under-five children are malnourished and suffer from anemia which interferes with their normal brain development and learning. This context has perpetuated the vicious cycle of poverty since the 1980s and has been hardly adequately addressed by successive Governments.
However, the scarcity of financial resources and lack of coordination by Government with other development partners including the banks has left non-state actors, such as NGOs and faith-based organizations, as the sole providers of essential social services in most of the country; with the fact that social interventions are fragmented, underfunded, and uncoordinated, limiting real impact on the poor.
Security, access to affordable quality education, health services, housing, transportation, electricity, water; these are the essential gods and services that Governments provide to their citizens and residents on a daily sustainable basis that make the big difference between what we call the developed world and developing countries like Sierra Leone.
These are the things that the majority of poor Sierra Leoneans that cannot easily afford and access the above, look up to President Bio and his New Direction Government to be working on 24-7, 365 until they become universally available.
However, given the present state of the economy, with per capita incomes hardly above $500 per head for the vast majority of especially those that are unemployed, a lot more has to be done on the economic front in terms of diversification so that more jobs, personal and tax incomes can be generated as quickly as possible as there is no quick-fix to the problem; especially when you throw in the most elemental of them – JJ Saffa’s beard and butter issue.
In Haiti, which is many times poorer than Sierra Leone, the World Bank Group introduced a development initiative called the Kore Fanmi Initiative that can be replicated here by the Ministry of Economic Development working in partnership with the Ministries of Rural Development, Local Councils and Paramount Chiefs, Education, Health, Social Welfare, etc, to facilitate the coordinated and decentralized delivery of social services through community agents in poor, rural areas.
In particular, IDA financing is scaling up this model of increasing access to basic services by vulnerable families to three of the poorest regions to break the vicious cycle of poverty.
This approach aims to improve access and efficiency of social service delivery in rural areas of Haiti by providing:
Family coaching using multi-sectoral community agents to work directly with families, providing basic services, including behavior change counseling, nutrition supplements, and vaccinations, and linking families to existing services.
A tailored family development plan, created based on a socio-economic survey that captures a family’s particular vulnerability is another area they are working on.
A dynamic and integrated information management system, which analyzes each individual family’s conditions and vulnerabilities, proposes key actions to be undertaken, and tracks progress over time. An “Opportunity Map,” an inventory of services available to the population through various service providers in the target area, which is used for referral.
The Haitian Kore Fanmi Initiative seeks to lay the foundation for a cost-effective and sustainable social protection operational strategy by providing a common platform to coordinate social interventions by all service providers at the local level.
Initial results for one of the three communes: Over 3,000 vaccinations to children under 5; more than 30,000 people participated in community meetings or received home visits by community agents; and over 800 life-saving commodities such as soap, water treatment, oral rehydration salts, micro-nutrients, and mosquito nets have been distributed to poor and vulnerable families.
The same can be done for Sierra Leone if the Government is serious about reducing poverty.
