Today Sierra Leone is perhaps best known
for one of the most savage and cruel civil wars in the history of mankind. Infrastructure,
including thousands of schools, had became just piles of rubble and the nation
was emotionally scarred for generations not least the country's children,
thousands of whom had been enforced under pain of death to become child
soldiers. Thousands more became orphans and for many their lives are still
traumatised. Today Sierra Leone is in 182nd
place out of 189 countries and territories in 2019 when ranked in terms of life
expectancy, literacy, access to knowledge and the living standards of a country
with a life expectancy of 54.70 years (2019). According the World Bank, 44.2% of the popluation live in poverty ranging from 60% in rural areas to 20% in urban and there is a child mortality rate (under fives) of 109.2 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2019. According to UNICEF, nearly half of a million of children under the age of five are stunted while 30,000 are suffering from malnutrition. In 2018, adult literacy rate for Sierra Leone was 43.2 %.
Child sponsor
programs in Sierra Leone work with orphaned, disabled and abandoned children,
access to health, nutrition and AIDS awareness programs, education access
projects and vocational training for teenagers as well as counselling services.
Other work is undertaken with poor children who are most at risk of trafficking when their families simply give them away either because they can't afford to care for them or in exchange for false promises of a better life for the child. Many of these children end up in forced manual labour, domestic servitude or, for girls, worse. You can help when
you sponsor a child in Sierra Leone.
Child Sponsor Sierra Leone: SOS Children's Villages
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Child Sponsor Sierra Leone: Sierra Leone Children
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Child Sponsor Sierra Leone: Volunteer in Sierra Leone
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