Programs
SLOIC is an integral partner with the Government of Sierra Leone in demobilizing and reintegrating former combatants and resettling internally displaced persons and refugees throughout the country. Since inception, more than 15,000 youths have graduated from Sierra Leone OIC’s four vocational centers, over 12,000 clients have been trained in small enterprise development and microcredit, and some 5,000 beneficiaries have received management training, counseling and consultancy services…significant milestones as the country builds on the past three decades and looks to the future.
SLOIC’s skills training areas include: masonry, carpentry, electricity, blacksmithery/metalworks, general agriculture, agricultural surveying, plumbing, weaving, boat making, tailoring, and home management. SLOIC also offers life skills in communications and computation skills, job-finding techniques, health and hygiene, and prevention of HIV/AIDS, among other subjects, and has training centers in Bo (the nation’s second largest city), Makeni, Mattru Jong and Lungi. The National Coordinating Office is in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city and seat of government.
Vocational Training Centers
The Freetown Vocational Training and Rehabilitation Center was established at Cline Town in 1996 as the result of a collaborative effort by SLOIC and OIC International. The establishment of the center was funded by USAID’s Bureau for Africa and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance to handle the training, rehabilitation and resettlement of war-affected populations. This represented a unique opportunity to address critical human resource development needs of Sierra Leone in a time of war. The activities of the center focused on psycho-social rehabilitation and skills training.
The center trained thousands of ex-combatants, wives of soldiers missing in action, and other war victims, including refugees and internally displaced persons. The center was relocated to Lungi later.
The Mattru Jong Training Center, started in 1993, consists of three components: agriculture, women’s program and building trades. The center provides on-site and off-site training programs intended to organize rural women into cooperative groups at the village level and provide basic entrepreneurial skills and credit assistance that will enhance their business activities. The goal of this center is to help combat the problems of rural unemployment and urban migration, increase rural productivity, improve income-generating skills through development of applicable small business management skills and training in vegetable gardening and small livestock production, rural construction, boat building, weaving, and smithing.
The MVTC was established in 1990 with support from Plan International, which provided funds to erect a vocational building and procure a vehicle for program activities. The Gary Robinson Small Enterprise Development Center was also established in 1991. “These centers have contributed tremendously to the development of the Bombali community,” he noted. “Many youths have been trained and the majority have been placed in jobs or offered microcredit assistance.” During the war,* the MVTC was vandalized and all tools and equipment were looted. United Kingdom-based Department for International Development supplied funds to rehabilitate the vocational and production unit buildings, including the metal works unit, and procured new training tools and materials.
The Bo Vocational Training Center was set up in Bo by USAID in 1977. The center provides training in carpentry, masonry, home management, metalworks, agriculture and auto repair. Discounted fees are offered to encourage women to train in non-traditional trades.
