Published: October 16, 2026
MONROVIA – Rape and abuse cases that once stalled somewhere between a district office and Monrovia will now be tracked from the first report until the case is closed in court, under a national database the Gender Ministry switched on Wednesday.
The Gender-Based Violence Information Management System replaces scattered, handwritten records with a central database linking all 15 counties, where health workers, police, justice officials and social workers can log incidents, refer survivors to medical, psychosocial and legal services, and follow each case to its conclusion. The European Union funded its development through the Spotlight Initiative, a joint program implemented in Liberia by UNDP, UN Women and the U.N. Population Fund, with UNFPA providing technical support.
Gender Minister Gbeme Horace-Kollie, who formally launched the system in the ballroom of the EJS Ministerial Complex in Congo Town, said gaps in collecting, organizing and analyzing data had long limited the government’s ability to design interventions and report in a coordinated way.
“It is my distinct honor to officially launch Liberia’s first gender-based violence information management system,” Horace-Kollie said.
She stressed that the system holds service-based data, meaning information gathered when survivors seek help from health workers, police or social workers, and said the police are sometimes the first to receive a case while at other times a survivor goes first to a hospital. The ministry, she said, would work with the Justice and Health ministries at the managerial and policy level to strengthen coordination among the institutions that handle survivors.
Mady Baiye, the UNFPA resident representative, told the gathering that the lack of safe, standardized, and consolidated data has limited the country’s ability to target resources, design prevention strategies, and hold response systems accountable. Baiye said the system rests on four pillars: standardized incident reporting, survivors’ access to essential services, safe data management and evidence-driven action. When service providers use a common data language, Baiye said, referral pathways become stronger and response times shorten.
“Let us remember that data alone does not end gender-based violence. Action does,” Baiye said.
Senanu Agbozo, the system’s technical consultant, who presented it, said it was the product of months of deliberation with the Justice Ministry, the Health Ministry, the police and other stakeholders convened by the Gender Ministry.
“It is not an invention from somebody’s bedroom,” Agbozo said.
He said gender-based violence data had been collected manually and scattered across the country, with incidents named differently from one county to another. Reports moved slowly from districts to counties to Monrovia, he said, and by the time they reached the national level, cases often went unresolved.
Under the new system, case managers enter incidents on tablets and smart devices. Because internet access is unreliable in much of the country, the application works offline: a case worker can keep entering cases without a connection, and the records synchronize automatically with the central server once the device is back online. Agbozo said the application was designed to be light enough to run on limited bandwidth. Data stored in the cloud is backed up daily to a server on the ministry’s premises.
Where devices are not available, case workers use a paper form keyed to a codebook, recording every variable, from the type of incident to a survivor’s education and employment status, as a number. An officer with a tablet receives the completed form and enters it into the system. He said the coding means that if a form falls into the wrong hands, it reveals nothing.
“To the untrained eye, you can never know what 05 means,” Agbozo said.
A spreadsheet register, he said, lets district and county officers keep their own copy of the cases they enter and automatically generates quarterly and annual reports, so that local offices can see which forms of violence are most common in their areas without waiting for national figures.
Agbozo said the system does not collect survivors’ names. It records the date, time, and location of an incident down to the district, who reported it, and the sex, age, disability status, education, employment, nationality, religion, and displacement status of survivors and perpetrators. It also records whether a survivor has been abused before, so repeat and high-risk survivors can be identified for future programs, and it maintains a database of repeat perpetrators.
The system tracks referrals and follows cases into magisterial and circuit courts, recording the stage a case has reached and when it concludes. He said the system names offenses in line with Liberian law, with help from the Justice Ministry, so cases would not be thrown out over how they were classified. Each case gets a unique serial number, and the system has a built-in mechanism to detect duplicate entries so they don’t distort the statistics.
“For survivors, we are assuring them that as this system comes into place, your cases will be heard,” Agbozo said. “If action is not taken at the district level, know that at the national level they are watching your cases and officers are there to follow up on your behalf.”
Access is tightly limited, according to the presentation. The system is closed to the public. A case manager assigned to one county can enter and view only that county’s cases; national data is visible only to administrators and analysts at the ministry, and partners can be given access to selected parts of the data. Agbozo said only he and one other person currently held administrator credentials and that he would hand custody of the password to the minister after the launch. He said the cloud is protected by security certificates and the on-site server by firewalls.
The administrator dashboard, demonstrated with sample data, shows national trends, cases per 10,000 people, a heat map of incidents by location and the most common types of violence, and can compare one quarter or year with another. Data can be exported to analysis software including SPSS, R and Power BI.
Agbozo said the sample data would be wiped after the launch and live data entry would begin. He said the technical installation and core team training are complete; caseworkers across the country will be trained next, followed by a review of the system and the codebook three and six months after launch. He said every county would receive at least two tablets.
U.N. Resident Coordinator Christine Umutoni called the launch a landmark and credited the minister with insisting on results. She said the system fits a broader move toward digital government, pointing to the digital census, voter registration and tax collection, and said information on gender-based violence is also a security concern.
“You cannot find what you cannot see,” Umutoni said.
But she warned that the system would be useful only if it is used and kept running. “Systems like this work when they are fed, when they are maintained,” she said. She also urged that campaigns against gender-based violence reach men and boys, saying that without addressing perpetrators the country would always have victims and shelters.
Civil society groups welcomed the system but said it would fall short without more investment. The speaker for the Women NGOs Secretariat of Liberia said advocates had relied for years on outdated and inconsistent data, often receiving one set of figures from the Liberia National Police, another from the Gender Ministry and a different one from the Health Ministry.
She said two tablets per county were not enough to reach the rural communities where violence against women and girls is high, and called on the government to allocate funding in the Gender Ministry’s budget for more equipment. She also said confidentiality, informed consent and data protection must remain central to the system.
“Ultimately, our success must be measured not simply by the data we collect, but by the lives we protect and the violence we prevent,” she said.
A representative of the national gender-based violence task force, speaking for its civil society members, said groups had pushed for the system since the first phase of the Spotlight Initiative and that uniform data would give partners a reliable baseline for planning projects and measuring results.
A Ministry of Health official said health facilities are often the first point of contact for survivors and that linking the systems would give the country a single reliable source of figures. A World Bank representative said the bank would support the effort and that confidentiality and a survivor-centered approach must guide any follow-up action.
During a question session, the information technology director at the Ministry of Local Government asked whether the system would work with other government platforms, noting that county service centers in all 15 counties have a window for gender-related services, and urged that it be added to the services offered there. Agbozo said interoperability had been discussed from the start and that the system could be integrated with others. He urged agencies collecting similar data to adopt the ministry’s codebook so their records could be merged.
When asked how sensitive information would be shared, he said data protection and data-sharing rules are part of the training modules and that some datasets would remain confined to the ministry. Asked about case workers in remote areas without internet for a week or more, he said the offline design was built for that situation. Asked whether case workers outside the Gender Ministry would be trained, he said staff at the Justice and Health ministries would be included.
Horace-Kollie closed her remarks with a warning to the officers who will handle the records, telling them that confidentiality and informed consent must guide their work.
“Don’t be a news breaker,” she said. “The data that we will be dealing with internally tells the story of many girls and women.”
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