An Open Editorial to Ecobank Liberia and BlueCrest University on Their Decision to Co-Sponsor the Strengthening Families Conference
JOURNALRAGE EDITORIAL BOARD · MONROVIA, LIBERIA · JUNE 2026
There are contradictions that are merely awkward. And then there are contradictions that are so precise, so complete, and so damaging that they require a public accounting.
In March 2024, Ecobank Group became an official signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles by UN Women and the UN Global Compact — principles that provide guidance to the private sector on how to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace, and community. Ecobank Group CEO Jeremy Awori announced the signature during a webinar organized by Ecobank Foundation and UN Women on International Women’s Day.
In September 2025, Ecobank Liberia’s Acting Managing Director Mohammed Dukuly launched the Ellevate 2.0 programme , a movement, in his own words, “designed to empower, elevate, and transform the economic landscape of women-led businesses in Liberia and across Africa.”
BlueCrest University Liberia describes itself as Liberia’s top-ranked technology, fashion, and business institute, built on the pillars of empowerment, enrichment, and enlightenment. Its rector has described the institution’s mission as inspiring the minds of tomorrow, fostering critical thinking, and preparing students to navigate the complexities of an ever-evolving world.
Both institutions have now placed their logos on the banner of the 8th Strengthening Families Conference.
journalRAGE needs both of them to explain how.
ECOBANK: YOU SIGNED THE UN WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT PRINCIPLES. READ THEM AGAIN.
The Ecobank Group has disbursed over $200 million in loans to women entrepreneurs across the continent through the Ellevate programme, provided business networking opportunities, and offered leadership and capacity-building training for businesswomen. With women owning just about 10 percent of SMEs in Africa and facing a $42 billion financing gap, Ecobank has positioned the Ellevate programme as a platform to close that divide.
These are not small commitments. These are documented, audited, internationally recognized commitments to women’s economic empowerment, co-signed with UN Women, backed by $200 million in disbursements, and launched publicly on International Women’s Day.
And then Ecobank Liberia placed its logo on the banner of a conference organized by an institution whose foundational doctrine — the 1995 Family Proclamation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, confirmed as current church teaching — states that by divine design, fathers are to preside over their families and that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.
“Presiding fathers. Nurturing mothers.” That is the theological framework of the institution whose conference Ecobank Liberia has co-sponsored.
The UN Women’s Empowerment Principles that Ecobank Group signed commit the bank to recognizing that women’s economic participation depends on their full social and legal standing as autonomous individuals; and to challenging the exact kind of patriarchal norm that defines women’s primary purpose as domestic.
The Strengthening Families Conference promotes those norms. Its doctrine classifies women who run their own households, who head their own businesses, who make decisions about their own bodies without the presiding authority of a man — as deviating from divine design. Those women are Ecobank’s customers. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellevate programme. They are the $42 billion financing gap that Ecobank has committed to close.
At the Ellevate 2.0 launch, UN Women’s Deputy Country Representative described the programme as “a transformative program that speaks directly to the heart of an inclusive economic environment and gender equality in Liberia,” adding that “women matter, women lead, and women deserve equal access to opportunity.”
Women matter. Women lead. And Ecobank Liberia has co-sponsored a conference whose doctrine says women’s place is in the home, under the authority of their husbands. These two things cannot both be true. And the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles say exactly which one must give way.
BLUECREST: YOU SHAPE YOUNG MINDS. WHAT ARE YOU TEACHING THEM?
BlueCrest University Liberia positions itself as Liberia’s top-ranked institution for technology, business, and fashion — a place that empowers students through enrichment and enlightenment. Its mission is to inspire the minds of tomorrow, foster critical thinking, and prepare students to navigate the complexities of an ever-evolving world.
A university’s sponsorship is not merely a financial transaction. It is a statement of institutional values. When BlueCrest University puts its logo on a conference banner, its students — the young Liberians who chose that institution because they believed it would prepare them to think clearly and independently — are watching. They are learning, from their university’s actions, what kind of institution they enrolled in.
BlueCrest’s students include young Liberian women studying information technology, business administration, and fashion design. Women building professional identities grounded in intellectual and economic autonomy. Women who chose a technical university education precisely because they believe their worth is located in their minds and their ambitions, not in their reproductive role.
The conference whose banner BlueCrest’s logo is now on promotes a definition of family that has no category for the independent professional woman. No space for the female IT graduate running her own startup. No theological framework for the fashion designer who heads her own household. Under the LDS Family Proclamation whose conference BlueCrest has co-sponsored, the aspiration that institution has spent a decade selling to Liberian young women — that their education is their path to autonomy and professional identity — is a deviation from divine design.
Furthermore, the conference is connected to a legislative pipeline that has produced laws in Uganda and Ghana criminalizing the existence of sexual minorities. BlueCrest’s admissions policy states that the college processes applications without any bias or prejudice. An institution that processes admissions without bias should not be sponsoring a conference whose network produces legislation that persecutes people for who they are.
Critical thinking, which BlueCrest claims to foster, requires the ability to ask what an institution actually stands for when its stated values and its actions diverge. BlueCrest has now created exactly that question for its own students. Every critical thinker on that campus should be asking it.
WHAT BOTH INSTITUTIONS MUST NOW DO
journalRAGE is calling on Ecobank Liberia and BlueCrest University to publicly withdraw their logos from the 8th Strengthening Families Conference banner before June 19.
For Ecobank, this is not a difficult decision. The UN Women’s Empowerment Principles the bank has signed are explicit. Withdrawing from this conference is what honouring that signature looks like in practice.
For BlueCrest, this is a question of institutional integrity. A university that prepares young people to think critically, to build careers, and to navigate an evolving world cannot simultaneously endorse a conference whose doctrine tells those same young people — particularly the women among them — that their primary divine purpose is to nurture children under male presiding authority. Students deserve to know which one BlueCrest actually means.
Both institutions have the resources, the relationships, and the reputational stakes to make this withdrawal clean, quiet, and swift. A brief statement. A logo removed. A commitment honoured.
The alternative is a permanent record — here, in journalRAGE’s published reporting, in the public domain — that Ecobank Liberia co-sponsored a conference that contradicts every commitment it made when it signed the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles. And that BlueCrest University, which claims to foster critical thinking, co-sponsored a conference whose doctrine those critical thinkers should immediately reject.
Withdraw your logos. Both of you. Before June 19.
journalRAGE extends a standing offer to publish any response from Ecobank Liberia or BlueCrest University in full, unedited, on our platform. contact@journalrage.org
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an editorial representing the position of journalRAGE. Founded in 2019. Both Ecobank Liberia and BlueCrest University were not contacted for comment before publication of this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.