Merry Christmas and Happy 2020

On behalf of SEND Sierra Leone, I wish you, your family, relatives and friends, Merry Christmas and a
happy 2020 in advance.

At SEND Sierra Leone, we have had our own share of challenges in 2019, but we have managed to
overcome many of them. We picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves up and kept moving forward. We
learned from our challenges and we are much prepared for 2020

We recorded impressive progress with our interventions in 2019 which promoted self-awareness and
the utilization of own initiatives of our target citizens to take the lead in their own development. Our
women economic and political empowerment initiatives continue to gain momentum while our work
on eradicating social norms continue to add value to life. Our work on nutrition contributed to
reducing malnutrition in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. Our WASH interventions reached the
most marginalised groups and provided them the hope and resilience needed to thrive as humans,
living dignified lives. We continue to provide citizens and service providers in Sierra Leone with the
tools to dialogue on services in order to improve on their relationships and to improve on service
delivery. We promoted accountability in local governance. It provided improved services for people
who needed services the most and included people previously marginalised.

In 2020, we will be exemplary in our conduct of program activities. We are committed,passionate and
we will lead the way in mobilising, empowering and networking rural women to take the lead in their
own development and to advocate for more women’s participation in political and traditional
leadership. We will focus on reaching the unreachable, marginalised, and forgotten women and
ensure they have the capacity to decide and to pick from choices and options available to them, while
creating critical consciousness among them to rely on their own capacity to transform their lives to
contribute to collective social, economic and political progress in their communities. As a result, we
will deepen our gains with the Eastern Women in Governance Network, while ensuring that more
young women have the capacity and interest to participate effectively in decision making.

We remain restless in the pursuit of a just and equal world. As we pursue this, we call on all our
partners who believe in our dream of a better world for women and men to stick with us and provide
us with the guidance and wisdom we need to reach the unreachable heights with our efforts to be
better, and to do things differently that will have significant impact on the women and men we work
with.

We declare a year of lasting change in the lives of our target citizens. We call on our partners to join
us on the path of creating the difference that matters in Sierra Leone.

Joseph Ayamga

Country Director

SEND Sierra Leone