15 Year Anniversary

Founded in 2006, 2021 was a big year for AdvocAid as we celebrated our 15-year anniversary. We are so grateful to everyone who has supported our work for women's and girls’ rights over the last 15 years. Here are a few of the amazing things we have achieved together!

• Provided legal support to more than 15,000 women and girls.
• Successfully challenged the 21-day time limit within which to file an appeal for a person sentenced to death.
• Secured the release of six women and three men from death row.
• Successfully campaigned for the death penalty to be abolished.
• Secured the establishment of two separate detention facilities for women, including Sierra Leone’s first correctional centre for women in Freetown.
• Established the first prison library in Freetown’s Pademba Road Prison.
• Strengthened police accountability with our police complaints manual and used the process to ensure disciplinary action was taken against police officers who threatened our paralegal when she intervened to stop women being charged bribes to obtain bail.
• Freed 22 people who were wrongly sentenced for loitering.
• Launched a documentary film “Kolonko” highlighting abuses sex workers face by the police.
• Successfully advocated for a new Legal Aid Act and a new Correctional Services Act. 
• Reached over a million women through our legal education outreach work, including our award-winning edutainment TV and radio series, Police Case.
• Grown to a team of 27 full time staff, with nearly 70% women.
• Supported the creation of the Go Bifo (Moving Forward) support group for formerly detained women, providing them with an opportunity to come together as a self- managing peer support network.
• Continued to operate without pause throughout the Ebola epidemic and the COVID- 19 pandemic, ensuring rights were maintained during states of emergency.
• Won the Namati Justice Prize and Clifford Chance Access to Justice Award.

You can read more in our 2021 Annual Report (attached at the end of this report).

We would not have been able to do any of this important work without our supporters - thank you so much for helping us to fight for justice for women and girls in Sierra Leone. 

Thank you for supporting this 15 Year Anniversary GlobalGiving page. We will now be closing this page, but please do continue to follow our work on social media and please consider donating to our other projects on GlobalGiving. Monthly donations are especially helpful as they help us to plan and budget.