The Gains Are Real. The Threat Is Real. And the Women Who Built This Movement Are Not Going to Watch a Utah Church Undo It in Two Days.
They did not build this in a conference hall. They built it in courtrooms, in market squares, in legislative chambers, in the rubble of post-war Liberia, and on the floors of international summits where they insisted that Liberian women be seen, counted, and heard.
The women’s rights movement in Liberia is not an abstraction. It is an institution, built by specific organizations, led by specific women, over specific decades of documented struggle. And when a foreign-funded conference arrives in Monrovia in June 2026 with a framework that defines their families as deficient, their autonomy as dangerous, and their gains as reversible, those organizations have something to say.
journalRAGE spoke to the landscape. Here is what the record shows — and what must be said plainly before June 19.
What Has Been Built
Throughout 2025, the Women NGOs Secretariat of Liberia — WONGOSOL — remained actively engaged with the Executive, Legislature, and Judiciary to promote gender-responsive laws and policies. Key focus areas included women’s political participation, access to justice, gender-responsive budgeting, and accountability in governance. The organization worked closely with the Women Legislative Caucus of Liberia and relevant government ministries.
WONGOSOL intensified advocacy for the passage of the Female Genital Mutilation Bill and the Women and Girls Protection Act, engaging female lawmakers, traditional leaders, and civil society actors to address harmful traditional practices and strengthen legal protection for women and girls.
WONGOSOL’s Executive Director, Madam Esther S.D. Yango, represented Liberian women at regional and global platforms, including engagements with the United Nations, International IDEA, and the African Union, ensuring that the voices of Liberian women influenced international policy discussions.
On May 6, 2025, UN Women Liberia officially launched the 2025–2026 Civil Society Advisory Group in Monrovia, attended by Liberia’s Minister of Gender and UN Women’s Country Representative, reaffirming commitment to inclusive dialogue with civil society, particularly women’s rights organizations.
This infrastructure — WONGOSOL, AFELL, the Women Legislative Caucus, the UN Women Civil Society Advisory Group — represents the institutional architecture of Liberian women’s rights. It is functional, active, nationally embedded, and internationally connected.
The Strengthening Families Conference is designed to dismantle what this infrastructure has built. Not in one day. Not obviously. But systematically through legislation that narrows the definition of a valid family, through doctrine that returns women to the presiding authority of men, through a children’s programming infrastructure that begins the ideological work a generation early.
The FGM Bill and the Women and Girls Protection Act: What Is at Stake
Liberia’s women’s organizations have spent years pushing two pieces of landmark legislation: the Female Genital Mutilation Bill and the Women and Girls Protection Act. Both bills represent the cutting edge of the Liberian women’s rights agenda — both directly contested by traditional and conservative forces who use the same language of culture, values, and African family structures that the Strengthening Families Conference deploys.
WONGOSOL has emphasized that women have the right to participate freely in leadership, governance, and national conversations without fear of intimidation, cruelty, or public ridicule.
That principle — that women have the right to participate freely — is precisely what the LDS Church’s doctrine on the presiding role of fathers and the nurturing role of mothers undermines. Not through direct confrontation. Through the slow legislative embedding of a framework that treats women’s full public participation as a deviation from divine design.
When the legislators who attend the Strengthening Families Conference in June return to the House with that framework in mind — and with cash behind it — the Women and Girls Protection Act becomes harder to pass. The FGM Bill faces new headwinds. The gains of 2025 become the contested ground of 2026.
The Cyberbullying Crisis: A Warning About What Is Coming
The Women NGOs Secretariat of Liberia recently condemned the increasing trend of cyber attacks and public humiliation against women, including recent incidents involving Assistant Minister for Public Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Saywah Nana Gbaa, and Counsellor Moriah Yeakula.
“From Madam Saywah Nana Gbaa to Cllr. Moriah Yeakula and many other women currently facing harsh criticism online, we are reminded that political differences and public opinions should never justify bullying, humiliation, or attacks on a woman’s dignity.” — WONGOSOL Statement, 2026
This is not incidental context. The rise of coordinated online harassment targeting prominent Liberian women is the social-media expression of the same force that the Strengthening Families Conference organizes institutionally. Women who exercise full public autonomy are targets. The conference provides the ideological framework. The online harassment provides the daily enforcement.
WONGOSOL is fighting both fronts simultaneously. It is fighting for women’s bodies through the FGM Bill. It is fighting for women’s dignity through its condemnation of cyber harassment. It is fighting for women’s political participation through its engagement with the Legislative Caucus. And in June 2026, it will need to fight for all of those gains against a foreign-funded conference that defines women’s primary role as nurturing children under male presiding authority.
What These Organizations Are Owed
journalRAGE is not speaking on behalf of WONGOSOL, AFELL, or any other Liberian women’s organization. They speak for themselves. And they do so powerfully.
What we are saying is this: every one of these organizations deserves to know, before June 19, exactly what is coming to Monrovia. They deserve to know who is funding it, what it teaches about the role of women, what its legislative track record is in Uganda and Ghana and Nigeria, and what the deployment of 17 new LDS missions across Africa twelve days after the conference means for the communities they serve.
WONGOSOL says it remains committed to strengthening advocacy, expanding women’s leadership, and promoting inclusive governance, peace, and justice across the country as Liberia enters 2026. That commitment will be tested in June.
The Ask
journalRAGE is calling on Liberia’s women’s organizations to do what they have always done: speak first, speak clearly, and speak on the record.
We are asking WONGOSOL, AFELL, the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, the Women Legislative Caucus, and every women’s rights organization in this country to issue a public statement before June 19 that answers one question:
Do you endorse a definition of family — promoted by a foreign religious institution from Utah — that places mothers under the presiding authority of fathers, that classifies single-mother households as deficient, and that uses child protection as the frame for a legislative agenda that has already produced life imprisonment in Uganda and three-year prison terms in Ghana?
The women who built this movement did not do it so a conference from Salt Lake City could undo it in two days at the EJS Exhibition Complex.
Their answer should be heard in every market, every church, every legislative chamber, and every international platform where Liberian women’s voices have been earned through decades of struggle.
journalRAGE is Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. Founded in 2019. If you represent a Liberian women’s organization and wish to respond on record, contact us at contact@journalrage.org before June 19, 2026.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an opinion and advocacy piece consistent with journalRAGE’s editorial mission. All factual claims are sourced and documented. Right of reply was offered to all named parties before publication.