Merry Christmas and Happy 2020

On behalf of SEND Sierra Leone, I wish you, your family, relatives and friends, Merry
Christmas and a happy 2020 in advance.

At SEND Sierra Leone, we have had our share of challenges in 2019, but we have managed to
overcome many of them. We picked ourselves up, dusted ourselves up and kept moving forward.
We learned from our challenges and we are much prepared for 2020

We recorded impressive progress with our interventions in 2019 which promoted self-awareness
and the utilization of own initiatives of our target citizens to take the lead in their development.
Our women economic and political empowerment initiatives continue to gain momentum while
our work on eradicating social norms continue to add value to life. Our work on nutrition
contributed to reducing malnutrition in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. Our WASH
interventions reached the most marginalised groups and provided them with the hope and
resilience needed to thrive as humans, living dignified lives. We continue to provide citizens and
service providers in Sierra Leone with the tools to dialogue on services to improve on their
relationships and to improve on service delivery. We promoted accountability in local
governance. It provided improved services for people who needed services the most and included
people previously marginalised.

In 2020, we will be exemplary in our conduct of program activities. We are committed,

passionate and we will lead the way in mobilising, empowering and networking rural women to
take the lead in their development and to advocate for more women's participation in political
and traditional leadership. We will focus on reaching the unreachable, marginalised, and
forgotten women and ensure they can decide and to pick from choices and options available to
them, while creating critical consciousness among them to rely on their capacity to transform
their lives to contribute to collective social, economic and political progress in their
communities. As a result, we will deepen our gains with the Eastern Women in Governance
Network, while ensuring that more young women have the capacity and interest to participate
effectively in decision making.

We remain restless in the pursuit of a just and equal world. As we pursue this, we call on all our
partners who believe in our dream of a better world for women and men to stick with us and
provide us with the guidance and wisdom we need to reach the unreachable heights with our
efforts to be better and to do things differently that will have significant impact on the women
and men we work with.

We declare a year of lasting change in the lives of our target citizens. We call on our partners to
join us on the path of creating the difference that matters in Sierra Leone.

Joseph Ayamga

Country Director
SEND Sierra Leone