LiBeria-Freunde e.V.

Liberia-Freunde e.V. is a non profit organisation based in Wiesbaden, Germany. Our aim is to support Liberians in their quest to live in peaceful and thriving communities, especially in rural areas.  The three key areas in which we seek to support Liberians to make a positive impact are health, education and culture. 

Our work builds on the cooperation with our partner organization in Liberia, Village People Empowerment (ViPeE). We regularly visit our project sites and thus build a long lasting cooperation.  

Our work roots in a long friendship and cooperation with the small village Konjorlloe, in the north-eastern region of Foya, Lofa County, in Liberia.The little town was completely destroyed by rebel groups during the civil war. Liberia-Freunde e.V. was founded as a non-profit organization with the aim to support Konjorlloe and many other communities in their efforts to rebuild their villages and support their sustainable livelihood in the rural areas of Liberia.

The organization supports a variety of smaller and larger projects across the three areas of health, education and culture that include:

• the provision of improved drinking water sources through the construction of stand pipes
• financing a local medical expert who is able to assist in even the most remote villages
• the construction and maintenance of a school, financing the teachers' salaries and school equipment and thus ensuring education for children in Konjorlloe and surrounding communities up to 9th grade
• micro-financing small business and empowering especially women in their entrepreneurial endeavors by offering training and micro-loans
• organizing and supporting cultural projects and events, such as traditional story telling, art, and music  

Based on an interview with Rudolf Janke, founder of the non-profit organization Liberia-Freunde e.V., Edwin Fayiah from the Liberian Newspaper "Daily Overserver" published this article released in May 2018 about the work of Village People Empowerment (ViPeE), our partner organization in Liberia:

Since 2010 safe drinking water is internationally agreed upon as one of the human rights for everybody. Never-the-less there are numerous villages and settlements in rural Liberia which are not granted access to safe drining water in there village. Even after Village People Empowerment Group (ViPeE) has supported the set up of wells with handpumps in Foya District during the 10 years from 2008 to 2017, there are still numerous villages around which do not have save drinking water. In May 2018 three of those can be lucky, because ViPeE in Kooperation with Liberia Freunde in Germany and the German Embassy in Monrovia was able to support the villagers activities to build a well functioning well with handpump. Again the construction and installation works in Gbongoma, Borma and Tuladu have been organized and supervised by a local technician based in Kolahun, while the effective work was done by the villagers themselves. 

The effective cooperation between all of them is again the backbone of the whole operation and the garantee that their well will be best maintained in future, a water manger will soon be nominated and start to collect a monthly water fee, which will be later on used to finance necessary repair as soon as it will be needed, without being depended of an external organization to wait for to come. This independence or self-dependance gives everybody a good feeling for themselves in the struggle to replace the missing activities on the side of the government, the local or regional one as well as on the national level like it is in all societies where taxes are collected and paid on a general level to finance the necessary infrastructure of education, health, communication and mobility as well as for doing business and creating employment. To feel in a community being able to develop such power certainly is as well a positive feature of a nation being able to act by themselves when it is needed, instead of being passively waiting for somebody from outside – within in or outside the country to assist and repair. Quite often in such situations Villagers are forced to return to fetch drinking water from the creek and bare all consequences referring to child death or severe sicknesses of adult people instead of playing football.

Besides everybody is aware that sooner or later no development will be sustainable if not financial means are available on alle levels, community, district, county of national levels, to maintain once constructed infrastructur of all kinds only by calling state authorities to do be present everywhere. Confidence in ones own abilities to manage live is promoting the feeling of higher quality of life in a community better than basing on the mentality of being given always.