An Open Editorial to Lonestar Cell MTN and MTN MoMo on Co-Sponsoring the Strengthening Families Conference
JOURNALRAGE EDITORIAL BOARD · MONROVIA, LIBERIA · JUNE 2026
In March 2026, Lonestar Cell MTN put a 12th-grade student named Beauty Harleyson behind the CEO’s desk at its Monrovia headquarters for a day. She had earned it — top performer in a competitive quiz, selected to represent Liberia among 15 young women chosen across MTN’s operating markets across Africa for the company’s “CEO for a Day” leadership programme. She toured departments, met with executive management, and held a mentorship session on leadership, discipline, and professional growth.
That same company placed its logo — and the logo of its MoMo mobile money platform — on the banner of the 8th Strengthening Families Conference, which opened at the EJS Exhibition Complex yesterday and closes tomorrow.
journalRAGE has one question for Lonestar Cell MTN: did anyone tell Beauty Harleyson that the institution behind the conference you sponsored believes a young woman’s highest calling is not the CEO’s chair, but the home she nurtures under her husband’s presiding authority?
A COMPANY THAT BUILT ITS REPUTATION ON WOMEN’S ECONOMIC POWER
Lonestar Cell MTN’s commitment to women is not a single press release. It is a sustained, multi-year programme spanning the company’s entire commercial footprint.
The MoMo Cook-Off, held in May 2025 as part of the company’s Mother’s Day celebration series, brought together female cooks and restaurateurs from across Liberia, with the company stating explicitly that it “intentionally spotlighted only women-owned businesses” as part of its “unwavering support for female entrepreneurship, SME growth, and inclusion.”
The company’s market women initiative, running for years across Montserrado County, was designed, in the words of its Senior Mobile Money Manager, to give market women — who are “often breadwinners for their respective families” — the means to save their income and grow their businesses through mobile money.
In December 2025, the company’s MoMo Discount Market finale at SKD Stadium was described by the company itself as “more than just a sales event,” but “a deliberate platform designed to empower SMEs, particularly female-owned businesses.” And the company’s flagship “CEO for a Day” programme exists specifically to put young Liberian women like Beauty Harleyson into leadership seats, as part of what the company calls its contribution to “national efforts to promote education, innovation, and greater participation of women and girls in decision-making positions.”
This is, by any honest measure, one of the more substantial corporate commitments to women’s economic empowerment operating in Liberia today.
And for two days, it has been co-branded with a conference whose organizing institution’s foundational doctrine says that a woman’s highest and primary purpose is not the marketplace, not the boardroom, not the CEO’s office, but the home, under the presiding authority of her husband.
WHAT THE BANNER HAS REPRESENTED FOR TWO DAYS
The 8th Strengthening Families Conference is organized, funded, and directed by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. This institution formally barred Black men and women from its temples and priesthood for 126 years, from 1852 to 1978, justified by official doctrine teaching that Black people were spiritually inferior. It only repudiated that theology in 2013. It has never formally apologized.
Its foundational 1995 Family Proclamation states that by divine design, fathers are to preside over their families and that mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. There is no theological category in that document for the market woman who is, in Lonestar Cell MTN’s own words, “the breadwinner for her family.” No space for the female-owned SME that the MoMo Discount Market exists to celebrate. No framework for a 12th-grade girl who spends a day running a telecommunications company and is told that this is what leadership looks like for her.
This conference is also the documented opening move in a legislative pipeline that has produced life imprisonment in Uganda, three-year prison sentences in Ghana, and a comprehensive anti-family-diversity bill in Nigeria. Liberia’s own Anti-LGBTQ bill is already tabled in the House of Representatives. The resources to push it through flow after conferences like this one close.
That is the banner Lonestar Cell MTN and MTN MoMo have stood beside for two days.
THE MOMO CONTRADICTION
There is a particular irony in MTN MoMo specifically appearing on this banner.
Mobile money exists, in Liberia and across Africa, as a tool of financial autonomy — a way for women who have historically been excluded from formal banking to control, save, and grow their own income independent of a husband, a father, or any other male gatekeeper. That is precisely why Lonestar Cell MTN built its market women initiative around it: because mobile money gives women the means to manage money “conveniently” and build their businesses “without difficulties,” as the company’s own Senior Mobile Money Manager put it.
A platform built to give women financial independence has no business sharing a banner with a doctrine built on the premise that women’s place is under a man’s presiding authority. MoMo’s entire value proposition to Liberian market women is autonomy. The Strengthening Families Conference’s value proposition is submission. These cannot both be sponsored by the same brand without one of them being a lie.
WHAT WE ARE ASKING — TODAY AND TOMORROW
The conference closes today. Withdrawal of sponsorship is no longer available to Lonestar Cell MTN as an option — the banner has already flown, the association is already made, the photographs already exist. What remains available is something more honest: accountability for what already happened, and a clear signal about what happens next.
Today and tomorrow, while the conference is still running, journalRAGE is calling on Lonestar Cell MTN to issue an immediate public statement disavowing the doctrine of the conference’s organizing institution.
Specifically its teaching on women’s role in the family, and clarifying that the company’s sponsorship was a commercial decision that does not represent an endorsement of that doctrine. If company representatives are present at tomorrow’s closing session, we are calling on them to say so from the floor, on the record, before the conference ends.
After the conference closes, journalRAGE is calling on Lonestar Cell MTN to commit, publicly, to not sponsoring any future edition of the Strengthening Families Conference — in Liberia or elsewhere on the continent where MTN operates — and to explain what due diligence process, if any, preceded this sponsorship, so that Liberians can understand whether this was a failure of vetting or a deliberate choice.
We are also asking the company to answer directly: does Lonestar Cell MTN’s “CEO for a Day” programme, its market women initiative, and its MoMo Cook-Off represent the company’s actual values, or were those campaigns marketing exercises that the company was willing to contradict the moment a different sponsorship opportunity appeared?
Beauty Harleyson sat in that CEO’s chair for one day in March. The market women of Montserrado County have been building their businesses on MoMo for years. They deserve a telecom company whose actions — not just its banners and discount markets — reflect what it actually believes about what they’re capable of.
Disavow the doctrine. Today. And commit, publicly, to never sponsoring this again.
journalRAGE extends a standing offer to publish any response from Lonestar Cell MTN or MTN MoMo in full, unedited, on our platform. Contact us at contact@journalrage.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an editorial representing the position of journalRAGE. Founded in 2019. Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. Lonestar Cell MTN and MTN MoMo were not contacted for comment before publication of this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.