The Family We Are Losing
Two decades of civil war aftermath, rampant urbanisation, unchecked social media, and deepening poverty have quietly dismantled the family architecture that once held Sierra Leone together. A generation is paying the price — and a landmark conference in Freetown is daring to fight back.
By Abdulai Gbla
In the crowded lanes of Freetown’s east end, a grandmother sits alone on a wooden stool outside a zinc-roofed dwelling she has shared with her family for forty years. Her grandchildren, she says, no longer greet her in the morning. They wake up, faces buried in mobile phones, thumbs scrolling through a world she cannot understand.
Her grief is not merely personal. It is the grief of a nation watching something precious slip away — the intricate web of values, responsibilities, and human bonds that Sierra Leoneans have long called “family.”
Twenty years ago, in the battered but resilient communities of post-war Sierra Leone, the family was the primary unit of survival, education, justice, and identity. Extended families pooled resources across generations. Grandparents were living libraries of culture and moral instruction. Children addressed elders as “one Pa” or “Ant” as a matter of respect — not as mere formality but as a sacred social contract. The village raised the child.
Today, sociologists, community leaders, and the young people themselves are raising the alarm: that contract is being shredded.
WHAT FAMILY VALUES MEAN — AND WHAT THEY MEANT HERE
Family values, in their broadest definition, are the moral and ethical principles that govern how members of a family relate to one another and to the wider community. They encompass respect for elders, collective responsibility, intergenerational care, faithfulness in marriage, moral discipline of children, and a deep sense of shared identity.
In Sierra Leone, these values have historically been inseparable from ethnic tradition and religious faith. For the Temne, Mende, Limba, Kono, and other communities, the family was never just a nuclear unit but an expansive, living organism. Decisions about marriage, education, property, and discipline were community affairs. Scholars have described Sierra Leonean kinship structures as deeply communal, where “the family” routinely included cousins, in-laws, and even long-term household friends bound by mutual obligation rather than blood alone (Gershoni, 2013).
Traditional institutions reinforced these values. The Poro and Bondo secret societies served as powerful vehicles of socialisation and rites of passage, teaching young men and women the ethics of adulthood, the art of conflict resolution, and the obligations of community membership. As cultural scholars have observed, initiation rites once lasted months and were rigorous preparations for moral citizenship — not simply ceremonial events (Fanthorpe, 2007).
The family was also the first school. Before formal education reached rural communities, grandparents transmitted history, ethics, and survival knowledge through storytelling, proverbs, and communal labour. A child who failed in moral conduct brought shame not just to his mother but to an entire lineage. The weight of collective reputation was itself a disciplinary force.
“The family was the court of first resort, the school, the bank, and the place of worship — all at once.” — Dr. Lansana Gberie, Author & Political Analyst
In this framework, family values were not abstract ideals. They were lived daily practices: greeting elders by name, helping neighbours carry firewood, refusing to eat before the aged, attending funerals even in distant villages. For decades after independence, and even through the horror of the 1991–2002 civil war, these practices held communities together when governments failed and institutions crumbled.
It is precisely this resilience that makes the current moment so alarming.
FORCES OF EROSION: HOW THE FOUNDATION IS CRACKING
The erosion of family values in Sierra Leone is not the result of a single cause. It is the product of compounding pressures — historical, economic, technological, and cultural — that havegathered force over two decades and now threaten to become irreversible.
1. The Long Shadow of War
The eleven-year civil war (1991–2002) did not merely destroy infrastructure. It systematically dismantled family structures. Children were abducted and turned into soldiers. Parents were killed or displaced. Communities were scattered across refugee camps in Guinea, Liberia, and urban Freetown. An entire generation grew up severed from grandparents, elders, and the traditional systems of socialisation that transmitted values.
Scholars studying post-conflict Sierra Leone have noted that the war fundamentally altered the parent-child dynamic and introduced trauma-induced patterns of neglect, violence, and emotional detachment that persist to this day (Springer Nature, 2013). Many parents who were themselves child soldiers or displaced youth have struggled to model stable family life for their children.
2. Rapid and Unmanaged Urbanisation
Freetown is now home to an estimated 1.2 million people, with hundreds of thousands having migrated from provinces in search of economic opportunity. This rural-to-urban migration has had a devastating effect on extended family networks.
In village settings, the extended family was a natural surveillance system: aunts, uncles, and community elders monitored children’s behaviour, intervened in domestic disputes, and enforced social norms. In the crowded, anonymous geography of urban Freetown, that surveillance dissolves. Young men and women live in rented rooms far from their home communities, stripped of identity markers and accountability structures, often for the first time free — and vulnerable.
Urbanisation has also shifted economic models. The traditional practice of family farms, communal harvests, and pooled resources has given way to a cash economy in which every individual must fend for themselves. The financial interdependence that once bound families together has weakened significantly.
3. The Social Media Storm
Perhaps no single development has upended Sierra Leonean family life as swiftly and profoundly as the smartphone and social media. Internet penetration, which was negligible a decade ago, has exploded among the urban youth. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WhatsApp have become the primary social environments of a generation.
The consequences are layered. At the most visible level, digital devices have physically removed young people from family conversation. Meals that were once sites of storytelling and discipline are now silent, each person staring at a screen. But the effects go deeper. Social media exposes Sierra Leonean youth to value systems — individualism, sexual permissiveness, consumerism, celebrity worship — that are often in direct conflict with traditional family ethics.
Commentary from Sierra Leonean media has specifically highlighted how social media platforms have been used to spread content that undermines respect for authority, glorifies promiscuity, and normalises disrespectful language toward parents and elders.
“We need to address those factors that are undermining, and in some cases destroying, marriage and family life.” — Archbishop Adward Tamba Sharles, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Freetown, SFC 2025
4. Economic Hardship and Absent Parents
Sierra Leone consistently ranks among the world’s poorest nations. With a per capita income of under USD 600 and an unemployment rate that disproportionately affects youth, poverty is a constant destabiliser of family life. Parents — particularly fathers — often travel long distances or work multiple informal jobs simply to keep households afloat. The resulting absence removes the most essential ingredient of value transmission: time.
Children left in the care of overwhelmed single mothers, older siblings, or neighbours receive less of the structured moral guidance that a stable two-parent household once provided. Teen pregnancy rates remain among the highest in the world — a direct consequence of fractured family oversight — with approximately 28 percent of adolescent girls in Sierra Leone having begun childbearing, according to the Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey.
5. Weakening of Religious and Traditional Institutions
For generations, mosques, churches, and traditional societies provided moral frameworks and community enforcement of family ethics. These institutions held weddings accountable, intervened in cases of domestic dysfunction, and offered young people structured spaces for growth and discipline.
That institutional authority has weakened. Traditional initiation rites that once lasted a year now last weeks, stripped of their depth by pressure from schools and urban schedules. Religious institutions are increasingly fragmented and, in some cases, commercially oriented. The vacuum they leave is filled by peer groups, social media influencers, and street culture.
A GENERATION ADRIFT: THE HUMAN COST
Walk through Magazine Cut, Kissy, or the hillside communities of Goderich on a weekday afternoon and you will see them: teenage boys lounging at street corners with nowhere to go, young girls navigating precarious choices with little adult guidance, children whose parents are strangers to their school teachers. These are the faces of a family values crisis.
The social consequences are measurable. Sierra Leone has one of the highest rates of gender-based violence in West Africa, a problem that criminologists have consistently linked to fractured family socialisation and the absence of male role models who model respectful relationships. Youth crime in Freetown has increased, as has gang affiliation among boys who seek in street culture the brotherhood and identity they no longer find at home.
The psychological toll is also significant. Research on West African post-conflict societies has consistently found that children who grow up without stable family structures are significantly more likely to experience depression, aggressive behaviour, and educational failure — outcomes that create a cycle of disadvantage difficult to break (Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2007).
Sierra Leone’s youth now constitute nearly 40 percent of the total population. If this generation comes of age without the anchor of family values, the consequences for national development will be severe. Strong families are the first line of social welfare, the primary educators of citizens, and the bedrock of a functioning civil society. When they collapse, the state — chronically under-resourced in Sierra Leone — cannot adequately fill the gap.
“Families are the heart of every society. When families are supported, entire communities thrive.” — Strengthening Families Conference, 2025
THE CONFERENCE THAT DARED TO SAY: ENOUGH
On the morning of June 26, 2025, thousands of Sierra Leoneans filed into the Bintumani International Convention Centre in Freetown. Government ministers, faith leaders, traditional chiefs, civil society workers, educators, and ordinary parents gathered under one roof with a shared and urgent purpose: to fight back against the erosion of family life.
The 7th Annual Strengthening Families Conference (SFC), organised by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in partnership with the Office of the First Lady of Sierra Leone, had come home. Over two days, with more than 1,500 delegates attending in person and thousands more watching online from across 16 countries, the conference addressed the most pressing family challenges facing Sierra Leone and the broader West African region.
The theme was direct and deliberately ambitious: “Building Stronger Families within Communities Through Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection.”
First Lady Dr. Fatima Maada Bio set the tone with a keynote address that refused to be ceremonial. She challenged every participant in the hall to move beyond rhetoric. “Let me use this as a call to us all to not let this be just a conference,” she declared. “Let us use this platform to design policies that will make women change-makers in our society.” Her words were met with sustained applause from a crowd that had clearly come hungry for action, not just inspiration.
Elder Alfred Kyungu, General Authority Seventy and Africa West Area President of the Church, used his keynote to reframe one of the most widely misunderstood principles of child-rearing — discipline. Drawing on the biblical image of the shepherd’s rod as a tool of guidance rather than punishment, he argued for an approach to parenting rooted in “active, loving involvement” rather than control. His words resonated in a country where harsh physical discipline remains common and where the science of positive parenting is only beginning to reach parents in earnest.
The Honourable Paramount Chief Sheku Amadu Tejan Fsuluku-Sonsiama III, chairman of the National Council of Paramount Chiefs, brought the weight of traditional authority to the proceedings. “The issue of strengthening the family unit,” he told delegates, “is critically important not only in the well-being of our people but also for the progress of our country.”
Archbishop Adward Tamba Sharles of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Freetown, speaking in his capacity as president of the Interreligious Council of Sierra Leone, was particularly frank about the scale of the challenge. He cited social media, the shift away from community-centred culture, and the breakdown of marriage as specific threats that required specific responses. His presence alongside Muslim and traditional leaders symbolised the ecumenical urgency of the moment.
Beyond speeches, the conference delivered tangible commitments. A donation of critical medical equipment — including ICU beds, defibrillators, and vital sign monitors — was made to a Sierra Leonean health facility, underscoring the organisers’ conviction that healthy families require healthy communities. The conference also announced the next edition in Monrovia, Liberia, in June 2026, signalling the regional ambition of the initiative.
For many delegates, the most powerful moments were the smallest: a single mother from the provinces who found, for the first time, language to describe what she needed; a young father who said he had never heard a man speak publicly about being emotionally present for his children; a teenage girl who told a journalist she had come on her own, hoping someone would tell her what a good family was supposed to look like.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS: VOICES FROM THE SFC 2025
In an interview, Valerie Young, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ director of communications, sheds light on the format of the conference and its intended impact. She notes that the Strengthening Families Conference was created in response to perceived deteriorating family structures and has been held in several West African nations over the past four to five years. She presented the family as “the unit that holds the fabric of society,” contending that the stability of society is contingent upon the strength of the family.
Honourable Mariama Zumia Zombo, a member of parliament for Pujehun District’s Constituency 099 stated that she had gathered extensive information from the conference on critical issues, including the Safe Motherhood and Reproductive Healthcare Bill, abortion, and sex identification in schools. She noted that the organisers of the Strengthening Families Conference delivered a compelling presentation on sexuality education in schools.
The Honourable Member made clear her firm stance on the matter, asserting that there is no middle ground on these issues. “If you are a boy you are a boy. If you are a girl, you are a girl,” she declared, emphasising her belief in the binary nature of gender.
THE PATH FORWARD: REBUILDING WHAT HAS BEEN LOST
The question is no longer whether Sierra Leone faces a family values crisis. The evidence — statistical, anecdotal, and visceral — is overwhelming. The question is what, practically, can be done.
Community and family advocates, drawing on examples from similar societies navigating the same pressures, point to a multi-layered response:
Reinvest in Intergenerational Spaces
Governments and NGOs must create and fund spaces where grandparents, parents, and youth interact regularly and purposefully. Community centres, youth clubs anchored in family mentorship, and intergenerational storytelling programmes can partially restore what urban migration has severed.
Reform School Curricula to Include Values Education
Sierra Leone’s Free Quality School Education initiative is a foundation on which to build. But the curriculum must extend beyond literacy and numeracy to explicitly teach civic responsibility, family ethics, and conflict resolution. Evidence from across sub-Saharan Africa shows that school-based values programmes have measurable impact when they engage parents as partners.
Regulate and Educate Around Social Media
Banning technology is neither possible nor desirable. But digital literacy education — teaching young people to critically assess online content and its impact on their values and relationships — is urgently needed. Families must also be supported in establishing shared norms around device use.
Strengthen Parenting Support Programmes
Parents who were themselves victims of the civil war, poverty, and fragmented upbringings often lack the tools to parent effectively. Evidence-based parenting programmes — already piloted by some NGOs in Sierra Leone — must be scaled and made freely accessible. The SFC model of bringing together faith, government, and civil society to jointly champion parenting is one replicable template.
Revitalise Traditional Institutions Responsibly
The Poro and Bondo societies, and the authority of paramount chiefs, remain influential in Sierra Leonean life. Their potential to transmit values is immense — but they must evolve. Harmful practices must be excised, and these institutions must embrace a renewed role as guardians of positive family ethics in a modern context. The Paramount Chief’s presence and words at the SFC offer a model of how traditional authority can align with contemporary family advocacy.
Centre Women as Family Anchors
As Elder Isaac K. Morrison reminded the SFC audience, women are the primary nurturers and teachers in most Sierra Leonean homes. Empowering women — economically, educationally, and socially — is therefore not a gender issue in isolation. It is the most direct investment in family resilience. Programmes that reduce maternal poverty, increase girls’ access to education, and protect women from gender-based violence are simultaneously programmes that strengthen families.
“Strong families anchored in respect, equity and love are the most resilient against poverty, violence and neglect.” — First Lady Dr. Fatima Maada Bio, SFC 2025
A CALL, NOT JUST A CONFERENCE
Back in the east end of Freetown, the grandmother on her wooden stool is still there as evening falls. The neighbourhood generator hums to life. Through an open window, a TikTok jingle blares. But tonight, something is different: her teenage grandson has come to sit beside her. He does not speak much. But he is there.
Perhaps it is foolish to read meaning into a single moment. But in Sierra Leone, small acts of return — a greeting given, a meal shared, an elder consulted before a decision is made — have always been the language of family. The challenge of this generation is to remember that language before it is entirely forgotten.
The Strengthening Families Conference proved that the will to remember exists. From the First Lady’s podium to the paramount chief’s measured words to the single mother who found her voice among strangers at Bintumani, a message echoed: the family is not yet lost. But saving it will require more than conferences. It will require a national reckoning — in policies, in homes, in how we use our phones, in how we treat our elders, in how much time we give to the people who need us most.
Sierra Leone built itself once on the foundation of family. It can do so again.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING
Fanthorpe, R. (2007). Sierra Leone: The influence of the secret societies, with special reference to female genital mutilation. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Gershoni, Y. (2013). Toward sustainable family policies in Sierra Leone: Developments and recommendations. In R. Ballard (Ed.), Family Policies in Africa. Springer Nature.
Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC). (2007). IASC guidelines on mental health and psychosocial support in emergency settings.Geneva: IASC.
Kposowa, A. (2006). Erosion of the rule of law as a contributing factor in civil conflict: The case of Sierra Leone. Police Practice and Research, 7(1), 35–48.
Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey. (2013). Statistics Sierra Leone and ICF International. Freetown, Sierra Leone and Rockville, Maryland, USA.
Strengthening Families Conference (SFC). (2025). 7th Annual Strengthening Families Conference Report: Freetown, Sierra Leone, June 26–27, 2025. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Africa West Area.
The Church News. (2025, July 1). Strengthening Families Conference takes place in Sierra Leone. Retrieved from https://www.thechurchnews.com
The Sierra Leone Telegraph. (2024, August 6). Sierra Leone and the negative impacts of social media — the way forward. Retrieved from https://www.thesierraleonetelegraph.com
UNICEF Sierra Leone. (2022). Situation analysis of children in Sierra Leone. Freetown: UNICEF.
World Bank Group. (2024). Sierra Leone country overview.Washington, D.C.: World Bank.
[Author’s note: Interview brackets in the body of this article are placeholder sections for responses collected during your field reporting at or around the SFC 2025. Replace each bracketed note with your actual interview quotes before publication.]
THE EROSION OF FAMILY VALUES IN SIERRA LEONE • 1
