While aid trickles in, Liberians get creative to make ends meet

Skeptical of foreign aid's promise, many are creating their own jobs through clever, small-scale entrepreneurial activities.

By Tristan McConnell | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 7, 2007 edition

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MONROVIA, LIBERIA - The walls are missing and the ceiling is snaked with cracks. When it rains, puddles form on the uneven concrete floor over which a twisted jumble of extension cords and power strips weave toward a small diesel generator chugging away in the corner.

It's a typical workplace in Monrovia, the overcrowded capital of this war-ravaged West African nation, and it's home to the grandly titled Association of Liberian Professional Secretaries and Clerks, where rows of customers learn to type on old computers.

"We are doing this work to help ourselves," explains Knowles Shain, the group's chairman. "The government should make employment for its citizens but if those facilities don't exist we'll do it for ourselves."

Last month, Liberia's president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf met with donors in Washington to secure $691 million in debt relief from the US, Britain, and Germany, and $355 million in aid pledges to boost the country's moribund postwar economy. This will also help alleviate a $3.7 billion debt burden run up by Ms. Johnson Sirleaf's corrupt warlord predecessors during 14 years of devastating civil war.

Yet, despite the good news, government officials and aid workers in Monrovia are skeptical. "Forgiving debt does not fill stomachs," says Mengesha Rebede, head of the United Nations refugee agency in Liberia. He and others explain that many of the aid pledges made years ago have yet to materialize.

Most Liberians – two-thirds of whom live on less than $1 a day – can't wait for aid and foreign investment to generate employment. So, like Mr. Shain, they are working with what little they've got to create their own jobs through clever, small-scale entrepreneurial activities.

Joseph Larmre pays $2 a month for a four-by-five-foot alcove alongside a dilapidated local administrative building in downtown Monrovia. He has worked there as a barber for the last year earning up to $4 a day shaving heads and trimming mustaches. "I need to do this barbering to pay for school fees for me and for my son. Without this money we cannot live," explains Mr. Larmre, who is studying economics at the university while his son attends primary school.

In Monrovia, almost every imaginable space has been occupied by squatters seeking a place to live or to run their business. Young hawkers weave between cars carrying their trays of sweets, pens, and handkerchiefs. The city was built for half a million people but today it is home to 1.3 million – more than a third of the population – and it is buzzing with activity.

Unemployment stands at more than 80 percent, although this figure doesn't include self-employed Liberians who make ends meet through unregulated, untaxed work. The last government survey, conducted five years ago, showed that a full 78 percent of the country's workers operate in the informal sector.

"The informal sector contributes tremendously to the economy," says United Nations Development Programme spokesperson Anthony Selmah.

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