Published: November 28, 2025
MONROVIA – The Liberia Peacebuilding Office and the Community Watch Forum have signed a new Memorandum of Understanding designed to strengthen early-warning systems, improve data collection, and reinforce community-security networks nationwide.
The agreement, signed Monday, November 24, 2025, at the Peacebuilding Office in Monrovia, formalizes years of informal cooperation between the two groups and underscores a renewed commitment to building stronger grassroots mechanisms for peace and stability.
Sheikh S.S. Kamara, Executive Director of the Peacebuilding Office, described the pact as an important step toward integrating community-level reporting into national peacebuilding strategies. He said the collaboration will expand joint monitoring efforts, strengthen local peace structures, and ensure that community alerts are properly captured, verified, and shared with national stakeholders.
“It is good to work together to expand the scope,” Kamara said. “This MOU allows us to collect data, strengthen peace structures, and ensure all our members report to our platform so we can review these reports and share them with our stakeholders.”
Kamara emphasized that Liberia’s early-warning system is only as strong as its community linkages, and formalizing the partnership will help ensure that local incidents, threats, and conflict triggers are identified and addressed more quickly.
Community Watch Forum Chairman I. Nyenati Caffey welcomed the MOU, saying it reinforces a mission shared by both institutions: strengthening safety, trust, and civic responsibility at the community level.
“We have a lot in common. Our intention is to make Liberia a crime-free society,” Caffey said. He praised the Peacebuilding Office and the Peacebuilding Fund as “tremendous partners” and reaffirmed the Forum’s commitment to making the agreement work. “If we must succeed in our drive, it means we must embrace inclusivity.”
Caffey said community participation remains central to preventing crime, monitoring early-warning signals, and ensuring that national security agencies receive timely information from local structures.
The partnership is expected to tighten coordination between community responders and national institutions, improve the sharing of real-time alerts, and deepen local involvement in peacebuilding initiatives across Liberia. Officials say the MOU will help stabilize communities, strengthen the work of local security volunteers, and ensure that warning signs of potential conflict, unrest, or crime are captured and addressed more effectively.
Both institutions expressed confidence that the new framework will enhance Liberia’s growing early-warning architecture and reinforce national efforts to sustain peace in a period marked by economic pressures, population shifts, and localized tensions.
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