Strengthening Education in Sierra Leone Seminar 5th March, Maynooth University

On Thursday 5th March The conference 'Strengthening Education in Sierra Leone' will hear

Dr Staneala Beckley, Chair of the Sierra Leone Teaching Service Commission,
Rev Dr Henry Aruna, RC. Bishop of Kenema, and Ms Carol Hannon, Irish Dept. of Foreign Affairs and Trade Education Policy Specialist, speak about the possibilities and challenges facing the ambitious Sierra Leone Government plans, for building an equal opportunity education system.
The guest chairpersons are Seán Farren, former Northern Ireland  Minister for Further and Higher Education, and later, Minister for Finance and Personnel, and Nora Owen, former Minister for Justice, Republic of Ireland . Renehan Hall, Maynooth University is the venue for this exchange on Thursday 5^th of March, 9.30am-2.30pm, followed by lunch.

The event is free but needs to be booked on eventbrite at this link

http://bit.ly/SLIPMU2020

More information

Reflection on being a volunteer in Sierra Leone

This post was written for International Volunteer Day on December 5th.

The Country

I arrived in Sierra Leone at the beginning of September 1989 on a two-year assignment with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO).   Sierra Leone is about the same size as Ireland, with a similar size population.  Freetown, where I was based, was established around the end of the 18^th century as a place where freed slaves from Britain and British colonies, were sent after slavery was abolished.  My initial impression was of a place where nothing worked.   In my first months I had to adapt to walking everywhere.  Public transport amounted to the occasional rust-eaten minibus or shared overcrowded taxi, which often broke down.  There was a scarcity of petrol, gas, rice and even stamps were rationed, an important consideration when quite a lot of my evenings were spent writing letters by candlelight.  There was no electricity in the village where I lived or in the University where I worked.  I was so busy coping with the day-to-day reality of my new situation that I didn’t have time to analyse it.  Later, I understood that all these circumstances contributed to what is known in development terms as a “failed state.” War was possibly inevitable in what was the 2^nd poorest country in the world.  Ironically, Sierra Leone is very rich in diamonds and other natural resources.  The mismanagement of these resources, combined with other complex historical, political and economic factors has meant that the people of Sierra Leone have gained little or nothing from the country’s rich natural resources.

Isatu at the village store, Leicester

The Project

I was employed to design and deliver non-graduate certificate and diploma courses to students in the Institute of Library Studies at the University of Sierra Leone.  This University is outside Freetown.  Established as Fourah Bay College (FBC) by the English Church Missionary Society, it is the oldest third-level college in sub-Saharan Africa.  During colonial time it was linked to Durham University. 

Challenges I encounter included the lack of modern textbooks on librarianship, a culture which did not put a significant value on libraries, great variation in the academic standards of the students, a political system that opposed democracy and free speech and the ongoing difficulty of operating in a very poor country.  Students frequently had to walk the three miles to and from the city to college.  The coffee breaks I took for granted in what was then National Institute for Higher Education (NIHE), now Dublin City University,   were replaced with  handfuls of groundnuts(peanuts) purchased from a woman who arrived each day with a brightly coloured enamel bowl laden with groundnuts, on her head.  Because children often attend school erratically in Sierra Leone (due to school fees, the needs of subsistence farming and other constraints) there was a great variation in student age from early twenties to late forties.  The majority of students -about 40 over the two years - were male.  In Sierra Leone more value is placed on the education of male children than females.  Economic considerations influence this to a significant extent.  When a girl marries -this is a society which puts a strong emphasis on marriage and family -  any money she earns will go to her husband’s family.  Thus a poor family will generally favour educating a male child, who will remain attached to the household and support his parents into old age.  Aminatta Forna has written a vivid and lyrical memoir of growing up in Sierra Leone "The Devil that Danced on the Water"  and I would recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about life in Sierra Leone.

A book in Sierra Leone costs the equivalent of a civil servant’s monthly salary. Most people will never own a book.  In addition Sierra Leone has a very strong oral culture.  Many of my students came from homes where their parents could not read or write. 
Shortly after my return to Ireland I wrote an article  about the teaching aspect of my assignment for "An Leabharlann: the Irish Library"

The road home from work each day

War and its aftermath

I left Sierra Leone in the summer of 1991,  having completed my two year contract. Fighting had broken out in the east of the country. There was a six o’clock curfew in Freetown.   Most people, including myself, expected the skirmish to end fairly quickly.  It turned into a ten year civil war, which left an estimated 200,000 people dead and an already fragile economy in ruins. Ishmael Beah, a former child solider has written a harrowing memoir "A Long Way Gone" which gives an incredible insight into events of the time. 

In 2005,  I returned to Sierra Leone on a one-month contract with the Agency for Personal Service Overseas (APSO) Specialist Service Overseas (SSO) programme, which has now ceased.  This was a project to set up a Library at the Environmental Foundation for Africa (EFA) outside Freetown.  I revisited the University of Sierra Leone and was interested to find that the library studies programmes had been expanded to include undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. After the visit I wrote a reflective piece for CILIP Update

Visiting my old neighbour Mammy Sesay who made a living from selling groundnuts

Reflection

I returned from a job where I wrote on a blackboard with chalk and had no electricity either at work or at home for the most part of the two years, to a university (NIHED had become DCU), where databases on CD-rom, personal computers, book and journal budgets were the norm.  Now i'm in Maynooth University Library and find that I can  keep up to date with events in Sierra Leone via social media - it's good to see so many people/organisations on twitter. I believe social media and open access to research and publishing offer great opportunities to develop scholarship in Sierra Leone and other African countries. 

Life has moved on.  Twenty six years have passed since my VSO experience.  I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to work in Sierra Leone and to meet so many great people and get an insight into a culture that is quite different to Irish culture although it shares many common values.

I think I’ve been able to integrate my Sierra Leonean experience into my life in a positive way through  writing and a reasonable level of involvement with the country.    These days I’ve mostly forgotten the poor food, lack of electricity, the constant walking and lack of creature comforts.  I tend to remember the vividly coloured African clothes, the visit to the gold mines,  the devils (men wearing masks and raffia costumes) who danced through the village raising swirls of dust during various festivals and the more exotic aspects of my time in Sierra Leone.

Helen Fallon
December 2017 

Positioning academic Libraries in Sierra Leone - at the heart of academic writing workshops

I’m really pleased to have a guest post from Miriam Conteh-Morgan, whose work in the area of academic writing is inspiring.Miriam is Associate Professor Deputy University Librarian and a Campus Librarian at the University of Sierra Leone. She has worked as a subject specialist at The Ohio State University Libraries. She holds a Master in Library Science degree from Kent State University (USA), an MA in Linguistics and English Language Teaching (Leeds University) and has taught Linguistics, ESL and African Literature courses at universities in Sierra Leone and the United States.

I taught librarianship in Sierra Leone from 1989 to 1991 and it’s great to see such positive development following civil war and the many other challenges this beautiful country faces.

POSITIONING ACADEMIC LIBRARIES IN SIERRA LEONE
AT THE HEART OF ACADEMIC WRITING WORKSHOPS

by Miriam Conteh-Morgan

   Twitter: @micm80

RECALIBRATING LIBRARY ROLES
“So where did they [University of Sierra Leone] find you!”  This exclamation came from a lecturer at one of Sierra Leone’s polytechnics who, himself an author/ researcher and journal manuscript reviewer, was participating in a workshop on academic writing and the use of e-resources for research. This remark was directed at this writer who led the section on identifying credible publishing outlets, selecting appropriate databases and other e- research materials and conducting searches in them. This was a maiden workshop in the University of Sierra Leone-led project to empower faculty and librarians around the country to engage in research activities that would ultimately strengthen higher education knowledge systems nationwide.

While the rest of the world may have come to regard Sierra Leone as shorthand for civil war or ebola, positive things are happening in its higher education institutions (HEIs) that tell a different story. These institutions are embarking on bold initiatives that would bring sweeping systemic change to the education landscape. One first step has been the creation of the new Consortium of Higher Education Institutions in Sierra Leone (CHEI-SL) and Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP). Fundamentally, this means that instead of seeing each other as competitors, the members of six public and one private institution would begin to work cooperatively to tackle current problems and upgrade academic quality of their institutions by, among other things, rebuilding research capacities and increasing output --activities degraded primarily because of skills flight and the greying of the academy—even as they struggle to meet the increasing demand for higher education.

THE WORKSHOPS
The Academic Writing Workshops form part of the institutions’ capacity strengthening initiatives and are supported by a grant from our Oxford, UK-based partner, INASP the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications,  through its Strengthening Research and Knowledge Systems pilot project in Sierra Leone. Being one of the INASP coordinators in Sierra Leone, the workshops have fallen under the purview of the University of Sierra Leone Libraries, and as Deputy University Librarian and head of one of its campus libraries, I coordinate with academics, librarians and IT departments at other institutions to plan and implement them.  

The first workshop, aimed at researchers, was held in January 2017 and co-facilitated by a visiting researcher, Dr. Luisa Enria of Bath University and myself. The original plan was to teach academic writing only, but we later decided on taking an integrated approach to include a segment on access to e-resources. For a first attempt, one cannot say it was not successful. However, based on the high energy and level of participant engagement, there were time constraints, so I knew I had to rework the format for future workshops. It was decided that we expand the workshop to not only add a second day for the e-resources but to make it a joint session for both researchers and librarians. This second iteration has proved to be the winning format, appreciated by both groups so it will be used as we roll out more workshops across the country for faculty and librarians in the seven-member Consortium of Higher Education Institutions in Sierra Leone.

The rationale for this format was simple: each group would need the other at some point in the research-to-writing process, so if librarians became familiar with academics’ areas of research and knew what resources to refer them to, working together on that enterprise would be more efficient and yield better results. Additionally, by teaming researchers and their librarians in the resource discovery phase, it is hoped that the latter would see themselves as a vital and integral part of scholars’ success and ultimately the institutions’. Active involvement in and thereby communicating libraries’ value and contribution to researchers’ success  to institutional leaders must be part of what academic libraries in Sierra Leone strive for.

LIBRARIES LEADING CHANGE
Some might think this is taking on an activist and self-serving role, but I want  academic leaders to recognise that after years of serving as mere warehouses of books during the long, lean years of the recent past in Sierra Leone, campus libraries and their staff are reinventing themselves and becoming central partners in the research enterprise.  By marketing the skills of librarians as research partners and situating them more centrally in the research life cycle,  campus leaders will see them as support units leading change and tangibly contributing to the reorganisation, rebuilding and renewal vision  of higher education institutions in Sierra Leone. And this may already be happening. The polytechnics have been aggressively pushing for upskilling their faculty, and perhaps knowing that research resources and library support now exist, they have developed a three-year publication mandate for their faculty, akin to a time-bound tenure requirement.

The Sierra Leone higher education narrative is beginning to change.

Note
For more about INASP’s work in Sierra Leone, read

Re-imagining higher education in Sierra Leone

and

Enthusiasm, timing and local ownership shape our initiatives in Sierra Leone