Slaughter ’80 leads delegation to Liberia, Sierra Leone

Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80 led a women’s technology delegation under the U.S. Department of State to Liberia and Sierra Leone from Feb. 27 to March 5. Formerly the department’s director of policy planning, Slaughter returned to the University in February to teach an undergraduate seminar on national security policy and a graduate seminar.

The 12-person team of female State Department representatives and leaders in business and development work was the first all-female delegation from its “21st Century Statecraft” initiative, which aims to improve diplomacy and global problems by increasing the role of technology, particularly through social networking. The initiative has sent delegations to nine countries so far, including Iraq, Brazil, Russia and Mexico, but this delegation was the first to focus exclusively on women and girls.

Representatives met with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Sia Koroma, the first lady of Sierra Leone, as well as women from across the two countries, including weavers, students, entrepreneurs and mothers. “Women are becoming very, very visible,” Slaughter said of the two countries. “It was really something to see a whole group of women in the meeting with members from the telecommunications industry and bankers.”

Yet despite recent initiatives, they lag behind men in outreach and information. In Sierra Leone, a woman is 44 percent less likely than a man to own a mobile phone. In Liberia, the number is negligibly lower at 43 percent.

Slaughter said the challenges for both countries include literacy, particularly for women, and infrastructure. Liberia’s power grid was almost completely destroyed during the civil wars, and the nation currently runs on generators.

“They are going to get cables, and that will change things. But no matter what opportunities open up, it cannot overcome the absence of roads, the absence of education and the absence of electricity,” said Slaughter.

The delegation hoped to help create opportunities for women through technology and “micro-work” prospects in Liberia. A novel phenomenon in global business and development strategy, micro-work outsources small, specialized tasks via the Internet to workers in developing countries.

“A large part of the purpose of these visits is just that: to hear what is happening and to connect people to others who are working in the same area in other countries,” Slaughter said.

The delegation is also looking into a center that would train Liberian youth, particularly girls, and provide them with micro-work opportunities. The delegation also aims to create more jobs for women in the retail sector of the cell phone industry.

In Sierra Leone, the delegation is looking to collaborate with a group of female entrepreneurs who run small-to-medium-sized businesses to look into a possible business center helping female entrepreneurs network, creating new opportunities for women and providing training for using technology in business.

In both countries, the delegation plans to explore the possibility of providing information through text message and voice-based services to improve the accessibility of health-related information and increase civic engagement.

These projects, which would be managed and funded with the support of the United States, local community partners and private organizations, are “under active consideration,” Slaughter said. “We will undertake a number of specific things, a long list of possibilities, and we are trying to decide which ... We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin.”

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Slaughter stressed the importance of technology in connecting people and her hopefulness for Sierra Leone and Liberia’s futures. “Just seeing the entrepreneurship and energy and commitment of individual people — there are plenty of men too,” she explained. “These are the memories that will really stay with me.”

“When we look at young people, we see the impact of technology — not just Twitter and Facebook — but that these are people who are connected to each other,” she said. “This is the kind of diplomacy that we have to practice if we’re going to connect not just governments but people across the world.”