Hawa Saffa is a 45-year-old business woman and a Nurturing Opportunity for Women (NOW) participant. She is also a widow with five children who lives in Ngolahun with her family. Before the NOW program in Ngolahun, Hawa lacked knowledge in savings and budgeting and household financial management.

In the spirit of sharing good news, we once again want to share with you our favorite accomplishments from this past year.

Like many villages in Sierra Leone, Kambama is resilient in the face of many challenges: limited access to clean drinking water, women's education and gender equity, and insufficient income. Learn how the community is coming together to provide equitable access to clean drinking water.

The leadership system in the community of Majoe displayed an unfair governance and social discriminations against women. Baindu Samu, a 30-year-old community member is one of those that went through this repressive and non-transparent leadership system. This is her story.

The Community Action program guides our partners to prioritize their poverty-related challenges and design unique solutions to those challenges. In this video, hear directly from Sheku and Jinnah, two Community Action volunteers from Bombohun, explain what they are doing to make their whole community healthy and resilient.

OneVillage Partners is proud to be partnering with Together Women Rise to fund the Nurturing Opportunities for Women (NOW) program. We recently sat down with Together Women Rise to discuss the impetus and impact of NOW and the importance and urgency of supporting women worldwide.

On September 8th, we gathered with our community of supporters both in-person and virtually for our Annual Partner Gathering. If you missed it, we recorded the virtual event just for you! Hear stories of impact from our community partners in Sierra Leone and words of inspiration from our founder and leadership.

Moinina Adu is married with a wife and has one child. He works hard in cultivating a farm to support his family, but the absence of safe drinking water facilities in the village made it so his family and others in the community had to cover 3-5 miles to fetch clean drinking water before OneVillage Partners collaborated with this village.

At OneVillage Partners, we know that when communities define what success looks like to them and have the tools to measure that success, projects and interventions are more effective and more sustainable – ultimately, the projects will continue to improve people’s lives for longer than if community members were not involved.

Mattu Vandi is a 32-year-old volunteer teacher married with three children. At a young age of 16, economic hardship forced her to drop out of school. Despite this situation, she was determined to bring about change in her and her family’s life.

Musu Kebah is a graduate of OneVillage Partners' Nurturing Opporunities for Women (NOW) program. During NOW, Musu learned valuable skills in managing her household finances and increasing profit from her business. But beyond money, Musu gained skills to become a confident leader.

Please join me in welcoming Pete into his new role as Board Chair! We look forward to his leadership as we embark on the next decade of building thriving, connected, and resilient communities in Sierra Leone.

From our most recent community partner, 12 women and men have volunteered to help improve the wellbeing of their entire community through OneVillage Partners’ Community Action program. These volunteers are part-way through a 14-step training on project design. They will emerge with leadership skills to manage the project and see it to fruition

On April 27th 1961, the United Kingdom granted Sierra Leone independence after over 200 years of occupation and colonial rule. It is important to remember that Sierra Leone history did not begin at colonization nor was it “founded” by the British. Colonization is however an important part of our history because it is the cause of so many challenges we are facing in our country today.

We are delighted to announce Together Women Rise as our newest grant partner, a powerful community of women and allies dedicated to achieving global gender equality.

In the community of Pejewa, Community Action volunteers trained by OneVillage Partners designed a project to increase agricultural productivity for the hundreds of farmers living in their community. Isata Harding explains their innovative and sustainable solution.

In honor of Women's History Month,, OneVillage Partners held a virtual town hall hosted by the Nurturing Opportunities for Women (NOW) Team. The team explained why a program like this was created, the importance of investing in women’s empowerment, the program’s impact on participants and their communities, and how we’re working with program graduates to develop the next phase of the program.

In this video, we take you behind the scenes and inside a NOW training session in the community of Peje Baoma, led by Hameedatu Turay, NOW Program Coordinator. You might not be able to travel to Sierra Leone right now, but you can learn alongside the women of Peje Baoma in a training session right from the comfort of your home!

In September, Sheku Gassimu, OneVillage Partners’ Community Action Program Manager, sat down with Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation. They discussed the colonial and often racist histories of both international development and philanthropy, the importance of centering communities, and why we should never give up on causing good trouble.

Historically in humanitarian aid and international development, communities haven’t had much choice in the type of aid they’re given. The Lead program is OneVillage Partners’ latest effort to even more directly enable communities to address their challenges from multi-dimensional poverty.