Liberia in the 1990s was a place of turmoil, host to a brutal civil war that would kill at least 250,000 people and leave many thousands more displaced.

The war uprooted Martha* from her farm in Lofa County. Her husband, Joseph, was a rebel fighter aligned with one of the factions vying for control, and had taken her and the couple’s four children away from the family’s land, to a city closer to the rebels’ base.

On the day in 1996 that he was killed, Martha felt her own life slipping away.

“I wanted to die that day,” Martha says. “Nobody was there to help me take care of the children – it was me alone.”

If that had been the end of Martha’s story – widowed by war and left to raise four children alone – it might have been enough of a tragedy. But a further injustice awaited her, one that would rob Martha of her means of livelihood — the land she had shared with her husband.

Today, Liberia is a country in transition, still recovering from the civil wars of 1989 – 2003, the years of political tumult that preceded them, and the more recent terrors of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2013 – 2016.

In 2018, the country elected George Weah as its president, marking the first peaceful, democratic transition of power since 1971. His predecessor, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, had become Africa’s first female head of state when she was elected in 2005, following the ouster of warlord Charles Taylor.

But the symbolism of Sirleaf’s presidency could only reach so far, and many of Liberia’s women are still waiting for gender equality.

In 2018, Landesa supported the Liberian national government in adoption of the long-awaited Land Rights Act, a progressive piece of legislation that strengthened the voice, bargaining power, and sense of security of women and rural communities across the country through extending legal rights to land for the first time.

But the law alone can only take Liberia so far — effective implementation and awareness of the law are ongoing undertakings.

Read the full article about gender equality and land rights in Liberia by Tyler Roush at Global Washington.