Barely a week before the General elections scheduled for March 7, 2018, the Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law (CARL) is pleased to share with you a synopsis of the proposed programmes or manifestos of three political parties, including the Ruling All Peoples Congress (APC), the main opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), and the National Grand Coalition. We should note at the outset that despite many requests from the three other political parties that participated in this year’s Presidential debate, they have regrettably failed to share a copy of their manifestos with us.
The areas covered in this synopsis include, Gender and the Empowerment of Women; Social Protection of the Vulnerable; Governance, Accountability, Rule of Law and Human Rights. We have focused on these issues because CARL current strategic plan covers these areas and they will be part of CARL’s programme over the next five years.
The objective of this synopsis is to provide the people of Sierra Leone with a simple-to-understand, concise, and non-biased presentation of the many complex issues in the various manifestos. To that end, the relevant information has been compiled into a simple chart-format which essentially poses two questions: WHAT the parties say they will do and HOW they will do it. As the text of any programme for government is written in a more nuanced style than this chart, some measure of interpretation on the part of the author has been necessary. This interpretation has been minimal, and goes only so far as absolutely necessary to make the information more accessible where the text itself did not offer clear what/how goals and solutions. The language and wording used in this chart is unchanged from the language and wording in the original text of the various manifestos. Any difference in wording, quantity of information, layout, structure, numerical ordering, specificity and detail stems from actual differences in the original texts themselves and is not the subjective choice of the author or CARL.
It is sincerely hoped that this document provides the people of Sierra Leone with a fair, honest and accurate picture of the programmes contained in the various manifestos relating to Gender and the Empowerment of Women; Social Protection of the Vulnerable; Governance, Accountability, Rule of Law and Human Rights. We hope that it will help to better inform choices in the forthcoming elections.
On our part, we will use this as part of our tools to hold the next government accountable.
We are grateful to the efforts of Paul M. Hoare, Research Analyst at CARL, for authoring this synopsis.
CARL (Centre for Accountability and Rule of Law) is an independent civil society organisation working towards a just society for all persons in Sierra Leone, through monitoring, advocacy for institutional transparency, capacity building and empowerment of citizens.
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