Together We Stand

[ 129 ] ones in the treatment centre and to receive advice and psycho- social support from community workers. While in quarantine children could also listen to education programmes aired on the radio while they were out of school. In spite of this immediate and necessary support, Mabinti said that she and her neighbours were still worried. “You didn’t know if Ebola was going to come for you next,” Mabinti said. “And we didn’t know what we were going to do with our farms. We were growing crops, and we needed to feed our families, but getting quarantined meant we could lose everything.” Familiar with Trócaire’s work in offering livelihoods support through local partner organizations 1 in the Northern province, DFID approached Trócaire with the request to provide a response to the immediate livelihoods concerns of the quarantined households. “At a certain moment whole communities were quarantined in Kambia district and families expressed serious concerns, such as the need to harvest their groundnuts and to take care of their farms and businesses,” said Trócaire’s Country Director, Florie de Jager Meezenbroek. “How to do that while people were stuck in their homes required some creativity, especially since there wasn’t much experience to draw from.” The most traditional solution was to provide families with cash transfers at the end of the quarantine period to help them get back on their feet, but that approach had severe limitations given the context. Trócaire’s initial meetings with key stakeholders and community members revealed that providing farm labour for those with farms was a better option than just providing cash transfers. As quarantines were occurring during the critical rainy season, it was vital to ensure that farm work could be done in a timely manner and that farm losses, through the loss of seeds, planting or harvesting, did not occur. The project Trócaire designed involved the provision of support through two mechanisms, which quarantined house- holds could select based on their individual needs: farm support through caretakers and/or labour gangs, or business support in the form of cash transfers. An assessment was done at the outset of the project, with each household selecting the livelihoods option they preferred. At this time, each family would nominate a family representative who would organize the labour and supervise the work being done on the farms. The family representatives would later sign off on all the work that was carried out and supervise payments to the farmers. For families opting for business support, cash transfers were seen as an appropriate solution. Initially Trócaire planned on directing these transfers to osusus (Sierra Leonean savings groups), but it was later decided that they be given directly to the households following the quarantine period. For each household a record was kept and signed off by the family representative or community leader with the amount of money the household would receive each day. In Kambia, Trócai re ’ s Humani tar ian Response Programme provided this livelihoods and business support to 412 households. Overall satisfaction with the project Image: Michael Solis, 2016 Kadi Kamara and her son in Kargboto community. Kadi now produces okra, pepper, maize, cucumbers and rice T ogether W e S tand