Help us create jobs that empower youth, affected by the long civil war in Liberia. Through your contribution, we can offer favorable loans for investments in business operations in Grand Bassa. By creating job opportunities, former child soldiers and other war-affected youths can earn their own living and thus build their self-esteem.

In Little Bassa – a peaceful coastal village east of Monrovia – a vocational and technical institution called Botanical Reintegration Village (BRV) is emerging on a piece of land acquired by the social enterprise IDEFOCS (Initiative for the Development of Former Child Soldiers) with the support of Action10. IDEFOCS has cleared the land from trees, dug a water well, planted cassava and constructed a home where ghetto dwellers can stay and benefit from a rehabilitation programme. IDEFOCS has also involved the community, to ensure a loving and caring environment.

With your contribution, Action10 can offer IDEFOC’s low interest loans for local business projects that create job opportunities

IDEFOCS has already started two projects which are now in a preparation phase. The IDEFOCS @ Safe Zone Laundry is a profitable business that will offer clothes washing services in affordable ways in Grand Bassa County/Buchanan city. The second project, Cold Water, is also a reaction for local needs in Grand Bassa. To get this business going, a freezer, generator and other equipment needs to be purchased. Once operational, both projects will be able to provide sought-after jobs to the rehabilitated youth leaving BRV. And with your contribution, Action10 can offer much-needed business loans that enable IDEFOCS to bring these projects to life.

Support Action10 now!  Three Ways How to Act to help Former Child Soldiers

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Our mission is to offer business loans to local entrepreneurs and raise awareness on cross-cultural respect. Our vision is a shift of paradigm where aid dependency has been replaced with international equal partnership and extreme poverty has been eradicated. 

About IDEFOCS – our Partner in Liberia

IDEFOCS (Initiative for the development of former child-soldiers) is a broad-based, democratic, pluralistic nongovernmental and non-faction youth organization in Liberia, established 2003 to advocate for and enhance the development of Former Child Soldiers (FCS), Women Associated With Fighting Forces (WAFF) and War-Affected Youths (WAY).

Following years of civil unrest, the need to ensure policies and decisions that would engender the participation of  FCS, WAFF and WAY in national development plans is paramount to the work of IDEFOCS. Through its holistic development, empowerment and employment programmes, IDEFOCS goal is to provide strategic direction into active youth service corps for the purpose of cooperating and working with relevant agencies, international partners and groups.

Mr. Morris Matadi, IDEFOCs CEO, was a former child soldier himself

Morris was captured at the age of eleven; he survived when his family was killed. Before the capturing his family lived a good life and his father had a high position in the Liberian army. During the war he was forced to commit crimes of war. During this time, he was blessed with two children, one boy and one girl. As a result of the cruelly of the war, their mother was raped and killed by another Liberian rebel army. After ten years of suffering, Morris gave his two children to a lady, asked her to care for them, and managed to escape the rebel army.

He fled to Ghana, and stayed in a refugee camp where he taught himself to read and write, by borrowing books in a library. In the Ghana ghetto, a special section was established with former child soldiers. There he initiated the Initiative for the Development of Former Child Soldiers (IDEFOCS), as the only means he could think of to improve the situation for all those who had suffered immensely by the civil war.

Morris went back to Liberia as soon as he could, and went to get his son and daughter back from the elderly woman to give them a home and the opportunity to start school. Morris is now working actively in the ghettos of Monrovia where former child soldiers still live and without any support or recognition from the Liberia Government.

He also support the women who went with the rebels as sex slaves, as well as their children and other youth who in different ways have suffered from the war and ended up in the ghettos. Without any means, Mr. Morris Matadi started the operations of IDEFOCS. He has appointed other volunteer workers and they together work in the ghettos. IDEFOCS arranges trauma counselling events. They appoint professionals to talk with the youths, to give them strength and hope. They give out food, if they find a donor, and arrange social events. They try as much as possible to coordinate with other stakeholders, as high up in the Government as possible. The aim includes preventing drug abuse and providing a home, education and employment. Morris represents the future for many youths in these ghettos.

About Liberia

Liberia is a post war Nation that has the record of 16 years history of war that has distorted every sectors of the nation – including the human resources department – and left the country into extreme Poverty with a high unemployment rate among young people including rehabilitated former child soldiers which also introduce a new life style of living, increase of crimes, drugs and mob violence.

As Liberia moves ahead with its recovery peace system, there are many different challenges to be addressed that will keep the country on path and some of the major challenges are fighting unemployment, and creating innovative businesses for sustainable growth. Since after the war, many youth have not had the time of opportunity to be self-sustaining due to the lack of business skills self confidence and unemployment. Due to these challenges, the Initiative for IDEFOCS is a nonprofit organization with a sustainable model which anticipate to establish a sustainable business to leave from donors driven to sustainability.