Grassroot Action for Integrated Development (GRAFID-SL) is a non-profit public benefit organisation working for women and youth empowerment through education, poverty reduction, equality partnerships, and community development. The organisation avoid partisan politics. It was established in Sierra Leone in 2000. It is dedicated to the promotion of a true partnership and unity between women, men, youths and children as an essential prerequisite to the peace and prosperity of the world.
GRAFID-SL was established in the wake of the rebel war and the present outbreak of the Ebola epidemic as a means of awakening awareness and engendering consciousness in fostering humanity for national development. The women, men and youths of GRAFID-SL came together to be able to translate these abstract concepts into practical realities through campaign strategies.
Its main goal is an integrated programme working for empowerment skills and advocacy for women, children and youth on the violations and abuses of the girl child at rural level. This includes teenage pregnancy, early marriage and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Its mission is to work in an effective partnership with women, youth and children and other agencies within their traditional background to develop their potential through increasing community awareness and responsibility. Its vision is a Sierra Leone where women, youth and children who know the crushing mystery of poverty and courses of hardship can work with their heads erect and be proud owners of a new world, possessing no feelings of inequality and no inferiority but only great humility, dignity and peace.
The women and youth wing of Grassroot Action for Integrated Development (GRAFID-SL) is made up of a mixture of groups including traumatized, vulnerable and marginalised women and youths. The thrust of the women and youths wing of GRAFID-SL is to unite, motivate, sensitize, mobilize and maintain their members to undertake viable roles on developmental activities through campaigns, education and sensitisation to promote justice and sustainable peace.
The overall aim of its programme implementation is to build the capacity of the rural youths, advocacy for women and children who have been violated and abused in the Northern Region of Sierra Leone. Training in livelihood skills is geared towards poverty reduction and the enhancement of a sustainable development programme. It encourages all women and youth to contribute to their household income and security for self-reliance and national development. GRAFID-SL has been in active service in implementing an advocacy programme raising awareness of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), as well as marketing training programmes and research.
