Liberia has been on and off the State Department's human trafficking watch list for years. In this desperately poor country, people accept jobs from agents to work as domestic servants in other countries. Usually, they are trapped, earning little money and subject to abuse. But several hundred Liberian women used social media to escape their traffickers in 2022.
Liberian academic and author Robtel Neajai Pailey says children, with their curiosity and strong sense of right and wrong, are the natural audience for a book about corruption. So she wrote one.
It's hard to learn to read when your country has been torn apart by war and disease. It's even harder when children's books come from far away. But Wayétu Moore, whose family fled Liberia's civil war when she was five, is setting out to change the odds for kids in Liberia and other countries with low literacy.
Liberia is Ebola-free, says the World Health Organization. But experts say that the problem of Ebola is far from over.
Disposing of millions of tons of potentially Ebola infected human sewage is no easy task. But Liberia has is attempting its own solution.
In Liberia, the first thing pupils do is have their temperatures taken. Schools had been shut for seven months after the Ebola outbreak.
There are plenty of kinds of workers mobilizing to fight Ebola in West Africa, not just doctors and nurses. They include "contact tracers," who monitor people and try to get them to respect quarantines. They say they're still doing a vital job without the tools they need.
Public concern about the spread of Ebola in Liberia seems to be waning, even though about 10 new cases continue to be reported in the capital Monrovia every day. Now the possibility of Senate elections there next week has health officials especially worried.
For those fighting Ebola on the front lines, personal protective equipment — those infamous hazmat suits — are both necessary and cumbersome. According to epidemiologist Sharon McDonnell, healthcare workers struggle to work around the limitations of that equipment — while taking a host of other precautions.
While it may seem as though media attention surrounding the Ebola outbreak has dwindled, President Barack Obama has said that "we are nowhere near out of the woods yet in West Africa" — meaning volunteers are still needed. Physician and epidemiologist Sharon McDonnell is one of those volunteers, and she says her experience working during the AIDS crisis offers her some perspective.
The issue of quarantine is not only a hot-button topic in the US: Officials in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, for instance, have grappled with the issue for months. And that is why some are now looking to Liberia to draw upon lessons learned from an evolved quarantine policy.