Following Liberia’s brutal civil wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a large portion of young men were left traumatized and marginalized. Anthony Kamara, a former child soldier, believes that these men, while having lost years to the violence, have their hidden colors waiting to emerge. Through the mental health nonprofit Network for Empowerment and Programme Initiatives (Nepi), Kamara serves as a facilitator for cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and cash transfers to violent street criminals. The project aims to transform these marginalized men into useful members of society.
Liberia, where guerilla warlord Charles Taylor recruited thousands of child soldiers, saw around 300,000 of its people perish in the 14-year conflicts from 1989 to 2003. Approximately one in five Liberians lived in extreme poverty shortly after the war. When the war concluded, this led to a rise in violent crime and a drug epidemic in the region. The homicide rate of 18.9 per 100,000 people is more than three times more common in Liberia than globally.
By targeting the most marginalized of Liberia’s population through Nepi, founder Johnson Bohr aims to ripple benefits throughout the country, as 68% of the local population lives below $1.90 per day. The organization started in 2009 and focuses on therapy, including CBT, and cash transfers for young men at the highest risk of violent behavior.
The Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia (Styl) program is an eight-week therapy and group therapy session, which teaches the most high-risk men how to regulate their emotions and adjust to their places in civil society. The men are left with $200 in seed funding when the program is completed to launch their businesses or studies. At the conclusion of the program, men who received this cash therapy were half as likely to participate in antisocial behavior than those who did not. Additionally, the beneficial effects concentrated in the highest-risk men, according to studies conducted on the project
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