Helping local communities help themselves

The government has built a brand new health centre in Tongoma, a village in eastern Sierra Leone, whose population has gradually returned after fleeing to escape a brutal 10-year civil war.

The school children of Tongoma eat a nutritious lunch provided free of charge by the US-based aid agency World Vision.

And colourfully dressed women fetch water from the pump on the edge of the village, which was rehabilitated by Peacewinds Japan.

There is even a new mill provided by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to help local farmers process their crop of swamp and upland rice, the main crop grown in the area.

But village chief Ansumana Yankuba wants more.

"We want the government and the international community to provide us with a community market, more water wells, toilets, a bakery and further agricultural inputs," he told IRIN.

According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, aid workers have helped 543,000 internally displaced people return to their rural homes since the civil war ended in 2001.

Now, with peace restored in the countryside, they are struggling to wean these people off years of dependency on outside support.

But wish lists for further assistance, like Yankuba's, ring in their ears the whole time.

"Most people in these communities have been refugees for too long and have become used to receiving handouts," said Salieu Koroma, repatriation and reintegration officer of the government's National Commission for Social Action (NACSA) in the diamond-mining Kono district, where Tongoma is situated.

Asked what the villagers of Tongoma had done to help themselves, chief Yankuba fell silent. But a young man passing by came to his rescue. "We helped to repair each other's individual houses," he said.

Before the civil war erupted in 1991 3,500 people lived in Tongoma, but after rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked and overan the surrounding area, all but three of its inhabitants fled.

Yankuba said most sought shelter in the slums of the capital Freetown, 300 km to the west, or in refugee camps across the nearby border with Guinea.

The village still contains the ruins of many houses, overgrown with weeds, that have not yet been reclaimed by their former occupants.

In order to encourage the villagers to do more for themselves, UNHCR allowed them to choose a project of their own to help rebuild the community, costing no more than US$5,000

Yankuba said the choice was very clear. "In 2002, when we came back to our village, we needed food badly and went for an agricultural project, whereby we got a store, seeds and livestock."

But as the community settled in priorities changed.

The next time Tongoma was offered money under the UNHCR's two-year Community Empowerment Project, the village decided to opt for a meeting house, known locally as a "barrie."

Built by volunteers and largely from local materials, this yellow brick building is now nearing completion.

"Women fetched water and cooked for the labourers, the men brought sand, cut bush sticks, provided free land, stones and other further local inputs for the barrier," Yankuba said proudly.

"With everybody returning to the communities, you need to have a place to discuss issues affecting us all," the village chief added. "In the barrie, we come together to discuss. It is also a place for meetings, social activities, a possible source of revenues, where we organise dances, concerts, cinema, where cases are heard and fines levied."

The Community Empowerment Project has allowed villages in all the main return areas of eastern Sierra Leone to decide on their own reconstruction projects.

But not all have chosen as consistently as Tongoma.

"Sometimes you fell too bad, because you go to communities with no water or toilet facilities, but they insist on having a market or a community barrie," said NACSA's Koroma.

Paul Longwe, UNHCR's reintegration officer in Kono district, meanwhile complained that the volunteer spirit was often lacking.

This was particularly a problem in the diamond mining areas, where most men prefer to spend their time sifting through the gravel of river valleys to search of glinting for gemstones, he said.

"In Koidu and the central chiefdoms with diamond activities, the level of (project) implementation is very low," Longwe confessed. "People have to bring raw materials like bush sticks, sand and unskilled labour, which is not paid, so they do not see why they should work free. They prefer to go mining."

However, aid to returnees is being phased out and the villagers will soon be forced to fend for themselves unassisted.

The UNHCR completed its official programme to repatriate 272,000 registered refugees from neighbouring Guinea and Liberia at the end of 2004 and Musa Abiriga, the UNHCR's representative in Sierra Leone, said programmes to help them reintegrate would probably be phased out by the end of this year.

The hope is that development-oriented aid agencies will take over from the UNHCR and the other emergency relief organisations to continue supporting the returnees.

But even though Sierra Leone lies right at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index, aid workers worry that with peace and stability reestablished, it has fallen off the radar screen of most international donors.

Fabio Germano, the reintegration coordinator of the German aid agency GTZ, told IRIN that he feared a fall in funding this year which could undermine the newly acquired capabilities of the local committees which the returnees have been using until now to run self-help projects.