On the Decision of Orange Liberia, Royal Grand Hotel, Ecobank Liberia, and BlueCrest University to Co-Sponsor the 8th Strengthening Families Conference — and What That Means for Every Partnership UN Women Has Built in This Country
JOURNALRAGE EDITORIAL BOARD · MONROVIA, LIBERIA · JUNE 2026
UN Women has worked strategically in Liberia since 2004. In those twenty-two years, it has built something extraordinary: a network of partnerships — with government, with civil society, with the private sector — that has moved the needle on women’s rights in a country that lived through two civil wars and came out the other side producing a Nobel Peace Laureate and Africa’s first female head of state.
Those partnerships are not abstract. They are specific. They are documented. They carry names, logos, and signed commitments.
And four of those names — four of the companies and institutions that operate in the same ecosystem as UN Women Liberia, that share platforms, attend joint launches, and co-brand with the UN Women mandate — have placed their logos on the banner of the 8th Strengthening Families Conference, organized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, scheduled to open in Monrovia on June 19, 2026.
journalRAGE is calling on UN Women Liberia to respond. Not privately. Publicly. Before June 19.
Because the credibility of every commitment UN Women has extracted from these institutions depends on whether UN Women is willing to enforce it when it matters most.
THE FOUR SPONSORS AND WHAT THEY OWE UN WOMEN
We are precise about the relationships at stake.
ORANGE LIBERIA was a partner in the UN Women Liberia Spotlight Initiative 2.0 Women’s Economic Empowerment Inception Meeting held in Monrovia in May 2026 — three weeks before this conference opens. Representatives of Orange Liberia sat alongside UN Women at a table convened specifically to align on programs targeting survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, former FGM practitioners, and women with disabilities. Orange Liberia’s logo appeared on that meeting’s materials as a partner. Orange Liberia’s logo is now on the banner of a conference organized by an institution whose doctrine defines women’s primary role as domestic nurturance under male presiding authority.
ECOBANK LIBERIA is an official signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles by UN Women and the UN Global Compact, signed in March 2024. Those principles provide guidance to the private sector on how to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace, and community. Ecobank’s Group CEO signed those principles during a webinar organized by the Ecobank Foundation and UN Women on International Women’s Day. The Ellevate 2.0 programme, launched in Liberia in September 2025, was described by UN Women’s Deputy Country Representative as “a transformative program that speaks directly to the heart of an inclusive economic environment and gender equality in Liberia.” Ecobank Liberia’s logo is now on the banner of a conference whose doctrine classifies women-led households as theologically deficient.
ROYAL GRAND HOTEL has no formal UN Women partnership of record. But it operates in the same ecosystem. In 2016, a documented sexual assault occurred on its rooftop premises — a case charged under Section 14.77 of the Revised Penal Code of Liberia, reported by the Daily Observer Observer, and resulting in the dismissal of the perpetrator by the hotel’s own chairman. In 2013, a female waitress at another establishment under the same ownership was assaulted by customers, and the manager refused to intervene. Royal Grand Hotel’s logo is now on the banner of a conference that claims to value women and protect children. It has no standing to make that claim.
BLUECREST UNIVERSITY LIBERIA is an accredited institution serving thousands of Liberian young people, including women studying technology, business, and fashion — building professional identities grounded in intellectual and economic autonomy. Its logo is now on the banner of a conference whose foundational doctrine says those women’s primary purpose is domestic nurturing under male authority.
WHAT THE CONFERENCE IS
UN Women Liberia knows what gender-based harm looks like. It has spent two decades documenting it, measuring it, and building programs to dismantle the structural conditions that produce it.
The 8th Strengthening Families Conference is organized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — an institution that formally excluded Black men and women from its temples and priesthood for 126 years, from 1852 to 1978, and only repudiated the theology behind that exclusion in 2013. Its foundational Family Proclamation states that by divine design, fathers are to preside and mothers are primarily responsible for nurturing children. It has no category for the single mother, the widow, or the woman-headed household.
This conference is the documented precursor to a legislative pipeline that produced life imprisonment in Uganda, three-year prison sentences in Ghana, and a comprehensive anti-family-diversity bill in Nigeria. Liberia’s Anti-LGBTQ bill is already tabled in the House of Representatives. The Inter-Religious Council of Liberia endorsed the conference on June 12, 2026. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection’s logo appears on the conference banner as a co-sponsor.
UN Women Liberia funds the Spotlight Initiative 2.0 specifically to combat entrenched patriarchal norms that restrict women to domestic life, punish them for exercising autonomy, and deny them full participation in economic and public life. The Strengthening Families Conference promotes those norms. It is the ideological engine of the very forces UN Women’s Spotlight Initiative is designed to dismantle.
The conference is not an external threat to UN Women’s work in Liberia. Four of its sponsors are inside UN Women’s own partner network.
WHAT UN WOMEN’S SILENCE WOULD MEAN
UN Women Liberia has built its credibility in this country on the premise that its partnerships mean something. That when a company signs the Women’s Empowerment Principles, UN Women will hold them to account. That when a bank launches a women’s empowerment programme with UN Women’s endorsement, that endorsement carries conditions. That when UN Women sits alongside a private sector partner at a programme launch, that partner understands what it has agreed to stand for.
If UN Women Liberia does not respond publicly to the co-sponsorship of this conference by four institutions in its partner ecosystem, the message sent to every institution that has ever signed a UN Women commitment in Liberia is this: the signature is optional. The branding is available. The accountability is not.
That message will be read by every company that is deciding, right now, whether to invest in women’s programmes or in the cheaper, easier option of simply putting a logo on a banner and calling it community engagement. UN Women’s silence will tell them that the banner is sufficient. That the commitment is decorative. That the principles are negotiable.
UN Women Liberia’s own framework states that it seeks to integrate civil society input into policy discussions and ensure meaningful collaboration with government and other partners, reaffirming commitment to inclusive governance and sustainable progress on women’s rights.
Sustainable progress on women’s rights is not compatible with co-sponsorship of a conference whose doctrine undermines it. UN Women knows this. The question is whether it will say so.
WHAT UN WOMEN IS BEING ASKED TO DO
journalRAGE is calling on UN Women Liberia to take the following steps before or after June 19, 2026.
One. Issue a public statement acknowledging that four institutions in its partner ecosystem — Orange Liberia, Ecobank Liberia, Royal Grand Hotel, and BlueCrest University — have co-sponsored the 8th Strengthening Families Conference, and that this co-sponsorship raises questions of consistency with the commitments those institutions have made to UN Women and its mandate.
Two. Contact each of the four institutions formally and request a written explanation of how their co-sponsorship of the Strengthening Families Conference is consistent with the gender equality commitments they have made in partnership with UN Women Liberia.
Three. Publicly clarify whether co-sponsorship of events whose organizing institution promotes doctrine that contradicts the Women’s Empowerment Principles constitutes a violation of the commitments Ecobank Liberia has made as a WEPs signatory, and whether UN Women will raise this with the WEPs secretariat.
Four. Review the terms of Orange Liberia’s participation in the Spotlight Initiative 2.0 programme in light of its simultaneous co-sponsorship of this conference, and issue a public statement on whether that participation will continue unchanged.
Five. Engage publicly — through a statement, a press conference, or a formal submission to Liberian civil society — on the implications of the Strengthening Families Conference’s legislative pipeline for the women’s rights gains UN Women has helped build in Liberia over twenty-two years.
THE STAKES FOR UN WOMEN’S LEGACY IN LIBERIA
UN Women has worked in Liberia since 2004. It helped build the infrastructure that produced a female Minister of National Defense, the first in Liberian history. It supported the Women’s Legislative Caucus that is now fighting for gender quotas ahead of the 2029 elections. It funded the Spotlight Initiative that contributed to FGM bans across counties. It launched the Civil Society Advisory Group that brings women’s organizations into dialogue with the government on gender policy.
That legacy is real. It was built year by year, partnership by partnership, commitment by commitment.
The 8th Strengthening Families Conference — co-sponsored by institutions operating within UN Women’s own partner network — is designed to reverse those gains. Not in one day. Not obviously. But through a doctrine that redefines women’s role as domestic, through a legislative pipeline that narrows the legal definition of a valid family, and through the slow normalization of the view that women’s autonomy is a deviation from divine design.
UN Women Liberia has spent twenty-two years fighting exactly that view. Four of its partners are now sponsoring it.
The question is not whether UN Women notices. The question is whether UN Women acts.
journalRAGE will be watching. And the women of Liberia — the ones who called the 116 GBV hotline, who enrolled in the Ellevate programme, who attended the women’s political leadership forum in Paynesville, who waited twenty-two years for a female Minister of Defence — are watching too.
They deserve a UN Women that uses its voice when it matters most. Not after June 19. Before it.
journalRAGE is Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. Founded in 2019. UN Women Liberia is invited to respond on the record before June 19. All responses will be published in full and unedited. contact@journalrage.org · journalrage.org
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an editorial representing the position of journalRAGE. All factual claims about UN Women’s partnerships and programmes are sourced from publicly available UN Women documentation. UN Women Liberia was not contacted for comment before publication of this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.