Medica-Liberia Launches Phase-three of BMZ Project

With funding  from the German government through the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), MedicaLiberia has launched  the third phase of the Sexual and Gender-Based Prevention and Response Project. 

Title: "Strengthening communities and institutions to promote the psychosocial health of women and girls affected by violence and increase their protection from gender-based violence in Montserrado and Margibi Counties, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis.

The project focuses on SGBV prevention through evidenced based social norms change approaches and response, including direct support to GBV survivors, targeted collaboration with state SGBV service providers, and advocacy for the improvement of service delivery.

Yah V. Parwon, the country director for Medica Liberia, claims that the project's first phase focused on tackling the problem of violence against women and girls and making sure that local communities had the necessary institutions in place to prevent and deal with abuse.

She added that the project lasted for 2016 and that people were trained to assist victims of violence.

"Phase one started in Montserrado and Margibi counties. It was really about addressing the issue of violence against women and girl and ensuring that the communities have structures in place, people were trained  to support survivors of violence and that project lasted for 2016," she said.

Parwon noted that at the end of the first phase, the second phase was lauch aimed at strengthening these communities structures to become an autonomous.  “So that we have system in the community that can support survivors and that ended July 2022. Our strategy from 2022 to 2025 focus on gender equality, empowering community to end voilence against women and girls.”

According to her, Medica Liberia focus area is to strengthening community based organization and structures to respond to their own need, promote women economic justice. 

“Advocacy for women and girls rights. What we have achieve with the BMZ support over the last years, we work at three different levels. We work at the micro-level which is the community level, the level of the survivors we are able to establish and train 76 support group women in 12 communities, empower 150 women through village saving loan program.” 

“Establish 12 watchteams community, work with 120 members of local community leadership to also give us the support to work around ending violence and establish multi girls clubs in school to adress the issue in school over 1000 SGBV  survivors have receive psychosocial and advocay support. We work with public service actors. 184 public services actors 48 trained traditional midwives. “

Adding that the new project is to empower and support women and girls affected by SGBV in these two counties.

Peter Speyrer German embassy deputy chief of mission said that there is no reason to justifies voilence aganist women and girl, sustainable impact can only be achived through collective efforts and mechanism that involved men and boys.

“Ending the voilence of course is a process, we are far from having reach the result we do direly need,” he said. 

According to him, ending voilence aganist women and girls is a process that is far from reaching due to physical voilence, Female genital Mutilation, intimate partner voilence, and early child and force marriage.

Targeting 12 communities in the two counties, the BMZ Project supports women and girls in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, legal services, and psychosocial counseling for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence.