Liberia Binds New Women, Peace Plan to Targets, Budgets As Boakai Launches It At UN
United Nations — Liberia’s third national plan on women, peace and security ties every commitment to a responsible government agency, an indicator, a baseline and a target, and places a gender ministry-chaired steering committee that includes the justice, defense and finance ministries in charge of delivering it, Gender Minister Gbeme Horace-Kollie said Sept. 21 as President Joseph Boakai launched the plan at U.N. headquarters.
Minister Horace-Kollie said the government wants the plan, known as NAP III, to be “measurable, financed, and implemented,” and that it intends to “become accountable for delivering” on it. The plan covers 2026 to 2031.
She said the steering committee, which brings in the ministries of Justice, Foreign Affairs, National Defense, and Finance and Development Planning, will be backed by a technical working group, a fully staffed national secretariat and a county advisory board, a structure meant to carry the plan beyond Monrovia.
Turning to the women who organized for peace during the civil war, including the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, rural women’s structures and the peace huts, she said: “This plan is yours before it becomes ours.”
“You fought for peace, but peace seemed very far and impossible,” she said. “And you showed the world that women are not just victims of conflict alone. They are also agents of peace.”
The plan is built around five areas of action, which President Boakai listed in his launch address: prevention; protection and access to justice; participation; relief, recovery and resilience; and coordination, accountability and financing. Madam Horace-Kollie said Boakai personally signed the plan.
The event, held on the first day of the U.N. General Assembly’s high-level week under the theme “From Pioneers to Global Leaders,” was organized by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection. It drew foreign ministers from Austria, Morocco and Sierra Leone, envoys from Sweden, France and Costa Rica, Nobel Peace laureate Leymah Gbowee, and women gathered at the Peace Hut at Fish Market in Monrovia, who joined remotely.
The emphasis on financing and measurement answers the central failing of the plan it replaces. Liberia’s second plan ran from 2019 to 2023 and was later extended to December 2025. At the national validation workshop for NAP III in Monrovia in July, the government’s lead consultant on the drafting said the new plan’s smaller budget reflects a push for a more realistic and achievable plan after large portions of the second plan’s activities went unfunded.
President Boakai made the same point in his address. “We have learned an important lesson that a plan that depends entirely on the priorities of others is not truly a national plan,” he said, adding that while Liberia would seek support, his government pledged the political will, institutional coordination and resources to implement it. He said the plan was framed as “our answer not only to what worked, but also to what did not work.”
Finance Minister Augustine Kpehe Ngafuan, speaking on a panel after the launch, said women, peace and security cannot remain a donor project. “If women’s peace and security is truly a national priority, then it must eventually find expression in the national budget,” he said. “This is critical because plans without budgets are assumptions. Budgets are where governments reveal their real priorities.”
Ngafuan said the gender ministry’s budget has grown from 2.35 million in 2023 to about 4.21 million, a 78% increase, and that nine pilot spending entities are institutionalizing gender-responsive planning and budgeting. He said his ministry has held a first “deep dive” session with the gender ministry in the current budget preparation and expects a second, to capture NAP III priorities.
The President also committed the Armed Forces of Liberia to specific numbers. He said the AFL, with UN Women, launched a two-year Elsie Initiative Fund project in February to remove institutional barriers to women’s recruitment, retention and deployment in peacekeeping. “Our immediate ambition is to reach 15 percent female representation in the armed forces by 2028 while contributing to our broader national goal of 40 percent by 2030,” he said.
On justice, Boakai tied the protection pillar to Executive Order 131 of 2024, which established the office to operationalize the war and economic crimes court, and said women advocates and civil society helped push for provisions prioritizing gender-sensitive justice for conflict-related sexual violence.
“They were not invited to the peace process. They made themselves impossible to exclude,” Boakai said of the women who mobilized during the war, opening his speech with a line that drew laughter: “In Liberia, men make the big decisions, the women make the small decisions, but the women decide which decisions are big and which decisions are small.”
The launch doubles as an opening move in Liberia’s term on the U.N. Security Council. Foreign Minister Sara Beysolow Nyanti said that “when Liberia decided its campaign priorities for the UN Security Council, Women, Peace, and Security was our number one priority.” Liberia will preside over the Council in December for the first time since 1961, and Boakai said the country intends to arrive at the Council’s annual women, peace and security open debate “having done at home what we ask of others internationally.”
“A seat is an opportunity, not an achievement. What we do with it is achievement,” he said.
Liberia adopted its first plan on U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2009, the first post-conflict country to do so, several speakers said. The second plan was built on five pillars mirroring the resolution: prevention, protection, participation, relief and recovery, and coordination and accountability. NAP III keeps that frame but pairs protection with access to justice, adds resilience, and writes financing into the final pillar.
The women who carried the peace movement used the stage to press the government on what the plan will need. Gbowee called for a permanent marker of their work. “I recommend that the government of Liberia declare August 18 every year as Liberia Peace and Security Day,” she said, proposing that schools teach peace on that day. August 18 marks the 2003 signing of the Accra peace agreement.
Former Monrovia Mayor Ophelia Hoff Saytumah said the plan will depend on money reaching the ministry charged with it. “I’d like to say the government of Liberia needs to do something for peace for the women of Liberia. And that is to ensure that the gender ministry is well funded,” she said. She credited Boakai with appointing women to about 38% of cabinet posts but said women want parity.
International partners outlined what they have put in and what they will offer. A representative of the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund said the fund has channeled $3.6 million through UN Women to Liberian civil society, supporting more than 21 projects and 44 organizations. A Peacebuilding Support Office official said the U.N. Peacebuilding Fund has invested more than $100 million in Liberia since 2007, with 40% going to women and gender equality work, and has committed to send 40% of its latest package directly to grassroots organizations such as the peace huts.
Liberia’s permanent representative to the U.N., Ambassador Lewis Brown, closed the event with a warning. “Every peace agreement that locks out women writes the preamble to the next conflict waiting to happen,” he said.
