LLP Sierra Leone

2021: Love Learn & Play Girls’ Club

, LLP Sierra Leone, UEF Foundation

Early in 2021, UEF.org partnered with global grant-giving charity The Paul Hodges Trust to pilot our LOVE, LEARN & PLAY framework in an experimental and data gathering way.

Together we designed and built a 12-week extracurricular course called the “Love, Learn & Play Girls’ Club”, to support 30 of Sierra Leone’s most disadvantaged girls with an extensive 2 hour afterschool learning and activity center every week – delivered by the brilliantly dedicated We Yone Child Foundation.

Just as The Paul Hodges Trust is committed to empowering women and girls with the resources and opportunities they deserve, the UEF strives toward maximizing flourishing through the simple formula of engaging with LLP. Our shared aim was to encourage women and girls to thrive through investing in Love, Learn & Play, after the African proverb: “If you educate a woman, you educate a nation”.

, LLP Sierra Leone, UEF Foundation

Utilizing existing social worker networks to identify those most likely to benefit from the UEF funded initiative, in collaboration with The Paul Hodges Trust we set about identifying and addressing key needs of underprivileged female adolescents in Sierra Leone, including: mentors and leadership, harnessing creativity, building self esteem and expression, strengthening peer networks, community advocacy, and awareness of body positivity and rights. We set about accomplishing this through the UEF framework for flourishing by engaging in Love, Learn & Play.

We are proud to announce that our pilot cohort for LLP in action, the “Love, Learn & Play Girls’ Club”, graduated in Freetown, Sierra Leone in July of 2021. The results from our first initiative, sharing LLP in action as a tool for improving mental health, breaking cycles of poverty, and a framework by which we truly flourish has proved to be a huge success as can be seen by the Following report:

Knowledge acquired by human beings has been increasing at an exponential rate for over a century. However, we have yet to make commensurate progress in human flourishing. This is because knowledge has been getting increasingly fragmented and sits mostly in silos. The UEF believes that if we can integrate knowledge across the silos of time, civilizations, geographies and academic disciplines.