Despite the many gains made in maintaining peace and security in Liberia since the end of the country’s 14-year civil war in 2003, many root causes of conflict remain unaddressed. Public institutional reforms are urgently required, while land disputes, corruption, boundary disputes and concession related tensions continue to be the main triggers of violence. The lives of many women are particularly insecure due to societal inequalities and sexual and gender-based violence, further weakening social cohesion in communities. Low commodity prices for primary exports and the outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in 2014 limited economic growth, undermining high expectations around the speed of post-war recovery and the delivery of peace dividends.

In 2016 the United Nations Mission in Liberia and UNDP invited us to assess Liberia’s socio-political fragility in the context of the political transition process and the departure of UN peacekeeping forces, which had been the guarantors of stability for the previous decade. We used the SCORE index to measure social cohesion and resilience capacities in local communities to prevent conflict. Working with the Liberia Peace Building Office and the UN system we provided predictive assessments of strategic peacebuilding interventions that held the greatest potential for sustaining peace at a time of declining peace and development resources. The SCORE assessment was repeated in 2018 and the results from our work has been used to guide the design the Government’s Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development. In fact, Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development has adopted multiple SCORE indicators as monitoring and evaluation indicators to track progress towards achieving the specific goals identified under different pillars.

In 2019, we implemented a small project in partnership with the Liberia Peace Building Office and the Embassy of Ireland in Liberia, which focused on creation of different evidence-based publications that are thematic and digestible, as well as conducting qualitative fieldwork to calibrate a wide range of indicators that can measure employability and financial literacy. These resulted domestication of SDG5 (Gender Equality) and SDG16 (Justice and Strong Institutions) targets in Liberia by matching different SCORE indicators to the targets, as well as the development of SCORE Employability and Financial Literacy Frameworks that helped expand the SCORE Content Framework further. Read more about our frameworks under the "What we do" tab.

We continue working with Liberian Government agencies, civil society organisations, UN organisations and the international community to internalise the SCORE results and translate them into robust policies in order to strengthen evidence-based policy making and to promote inclusive economic growth and resilience. Our efforts also include transfer of methodological know-how especially with government officials, allowing Liberian experts to take a more hands on approach in the design and implementation of future evidence-based assessments instruments.

Most recently, we have launched the third wave of SCORE Liberia (2020) in partnership with the Liberia Peace Building Office and UNDP, to continue supporting the evidence needs of the Liberian Government and to support the monitoring and evaluation of Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development.