Our time in Freetown, Sierra Leone, has now come to an end. This past week, we presented our work over the summer to Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr as well as the team in the Mayor's Delivery Unit and handed over our report and two slide decks containing our findings and conclusions.
Me and Stuti with Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr.
The work can be broadly divided into two parts; a Gender Mainstreaming Framework, a tool to help bring gender considerations into all steps of the policy process, and an evaluation of the impacts of three programs initiated by the Mayor on women and girls in the city. Although external circumstances put limitations on our work - such as lack of data and logistical challenges, I am proud of the end products and hope that they will be useful for the team.
Presenting our findings to the team at the Mayor's Delivery Unit.
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We spent our last days in Freetown saying goodbye to all the wonderful people we have met during our time here. We have made some very good friends over the past two months that I will miss, and hope to see again soon.
Freetown has a way of making you feel like you are a part of a community. Waking up in Iceland this morning, I have messages from multiple people in Freetown asking if I arrived safely - from friends and also people who I met regularly but didn't really become friends, such as Kelvin who exchanged my money from USD to SLL. The person we ordered lunch from sent Stuti a message that they missed us. Receiving messages from various people on a daily basis checking in on me is an aspect of Sierra Leonian culture that felt peculiar to me at first, coming from a Nordic culture where people are quite direct and mainly send messages with a specific purpose, but it definitely grew on me.
As I reflect on the past two months, and prepare to answer questions from family and friends about how my summer has been, it is hard to come up with a definitive answer. The summer was fun, exciting, challenging, frustrating, thought-provoking, and everything in between. It will take me a while to process. Until then, I can at least say that I am really happy that I made a decision to spend my summer in Freetown.
The best part of my summer is that I got to spend it with this girl.
Leicester Peak, looking over Freetown.
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