By: Julius Konton
Liberia’s Finance and Development Planning Minister Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan has called for a fundamental shift in the way the country finances peacebuilding and women’s participation in peace and security, arguing that national commitments must be reflected in the government’s budget rather than depend primarily on externally funded projects.
“For us in Liberia, we believe in principles. If peace and security is a priority, then it must eventually find its way into the national budget,” Ngafuan said, stressing that sustainable peace requires more than political declarations, it requires predictable domestic resources.
The minister acknowledged the important contribution of Liberia’s international development partners, but warned against allowing donor-funded programmes to become substitutes for national ownership.
“We can’t say we own an agenda if its survival depends entirely on someone else’s project cycle,” he said.
According to Ngafuan, external assistance remains important to Liberia’s development, but partnerships should strengthen national priorities and institutions rather than determine them.
His remarks carry particular significance in a country whose modern history was profoundly shaped by conflict. Liberia’s civil wars, spanning roughly 14 years, claimed the lives of nearly 250,000 people and displaced millions, according to United Nations records.
The Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement, signed on August 18, 2003, brought the second civil war to an end and opened the way for a prolonged period of post-war reconstruction and peacebuilding.
The United Nations subsequently established the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), which supported disarmament, institution-building and three post-war electoral cycles before transferring full security responsibility to Liberian authorities in 2016.
Ngafuan particularly highlighted the role of Liberian women in the country’s transition from war to peace, describing them not as spectators but as “architects” of the peace process.
Women organized mass demonstrations, sit-ins, strikes and community mobilization campaigns and pressed the warring parties to reach an agreement.
During the 2003 peace negotiations in Accra, Liberian women travelled to Ghana and staged a high-profile sit-in to pressure negotiators to remain at the talks until an agreement was reached.
The women’s peace movement nevertheless operated within a formal process in which women remained underrepresented.
Research on the Accra process shows that women had no female negotiators or mediators in the formal talks, although female civil-society leaders participated as observers and accounted for 17 percent of witnesses to the signing of the final agreement.
The contrast between women’s powerful grassroots mobilization and their limited formal representation has remained an important lesson in Liberia’s Women, Peace and Security agenda.
Ngafuan argued that this history gives Liberia a special responsibility to treat Women, Peace and Security as a national investment rather than simply another development project supported by international partners.
“Women, Peace and Security can’t be simply a donor project for Liberia; it must and it is a national investment,” he said.
He said the government is seeking to institutionalize that approach through Liberia’s ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development (2025–2029), the country’s fourth post-conflict national development plan.
The plan places gender equality and women’s empowerment within the broader national development framework and identifies inclusive social development as a strategic policy area.
The ARREST Agenda also seeks to strengthen the connection between development planning and program-based budgeting so that national priorities are translated into actual public expenditure.
“Gender is treated as a cross-cutting development priority,” Ngafuan said, explaining that responsibility for advancing gender equality cannot rest with the Ministry of Gender alone.
He pointed to education, health, agriculture, justice, security and the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning itself as institutions with responsibilities for implementing gender-related commitments.
A central mechanism, he said, is Gender-Responsive Planning and Budgeting (GRPB), which seeks to connect policy commitments with actual resource allocation.
“Plans without budget are assumptions, and budgets are where government realizes its real priorities,” Ngafuan said.
According to the minister, nine government planning entities are being used as pilots for institutionalizing gender considerations within planning and budgeting processes.
He also said the allocation to the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection had increased from US$2.35 million in 2023 to US$4.21 million, representing an increase of approximately 79 percent based on the figures he cited.
He indicated that the government intends to continue increasing support as it works to translate gender and peacebuilding commitments into concrete programmes.
The move comes as Liberia prepares to strengthen its next generation of Women, Peace and Security programming. Liberia has previously implemented two National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security, covering 2009–2013 and 2019–2023.
The second plan focused on prevention, protection, women’s participation, relief and recovery, and coordination and accountability.
The Ministry of Gender began assessing the second plan as part of preparations for a third-generation National Action Plan for 2026–2031.
The broader development agenda also faces formidable economic and social challenges. Liberia’s ARREST Agenda identifies the country as a low-income state with significant infrastructure, employment, governance and human-development constraints.
The plan notes that nearly 45 percent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty and sets targets aimed at raising economic output, expanding human capital and improving gender equality and women’s participation in leadership.
The national plan, for example, establishes a 2029 target of increasing women’s representation in leadership from a 2023 baseline of 30 percent to 50 percent, while seeking improvements in women’s economic participation and reductions in gender-based violence.
It also targets a substantial improvement in Liberia’s global gender-index performance.
For Ngafuan, however, the central question is not simply how much international assistance Liberia can attract, but how effectively the government can incorporate peace, gender equality and women’s participation into its own development architecture.
He said the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning will continue working with the Ministry of Gender to ensure that priorities contained in the emerging National Action Plan III on Women, Peace and Security are reflected in the national budget.
“We are in budget preparations, and we had the first deep dive with the Ministry of Gender,” Ngafuan said, adding that another round of discussions is expected as the government considers how to scale up support for the sector.
“Women’s issues are development issues,” he emphasized.
Two decades after the end of Liberia’s civil war, the country’s experience offers a powerful lesson: peace can be negotiated through political agreements, protected through security institutions and sustained through reconciliation but its durability is also closely connected to whether national governments are willing to invest domestic resources in the people and institutions responsible for maintaining it.
For Liberia, where women played a highly visible role in the struggle that helped end the civil war, the emerging policy debate is increasingly shifting from recognition of their contribution to the harder question of how that contribution can be translated into sustained national investment, representation and measurable development outcomes.
