Published: September 21, 2026
Leymah Gbowee told a U.N. gathering that Joseph Boakai gave US$300 to Liberia’s women’s peace movement during its 2003 campaign.
MONROVIA – Nobel Peace laureate Leymah Gbowee has revealed that President Joseph Boakai helped fund the women’s peace movement in 2003, giving her money outside a Rotary Club meeting he led after members asked her to leave and sent them out of the room.
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By Lennart Dodoo
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Madam Gbowee, who led the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, told the story at a side event on the margins of the 81st U.N. General Assembly in New York, where Boakai had just launched Liberia’s third national action plan on women, peace and security. Invited to share lessons from the peace movement, she said she was turned away while seeking funds, then named the man who had helped her, with Boakai in the audience.
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“That person was you, President Boakai,” she said.
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‘Leymah, come, I’ll help you’
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Madam Gbowee said raising money was one of the movement’s greatest challenges in 2003. Someone told her to find a particular individual who could help, she said.
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“We got in touch with this person, and the person said, ‘Leymah, come, I’ll help you,’” she said.
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She went with him to an event to make a presentation, dressed not in a suit but in a white T-shirt, a white hair tie, rubber slippers and a lappa. Some people in the room asked her to leave; she said it was not a space for those kinds of conversations.
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“I wasn’t discouraged because I think that moment was supposed to discourage me to go back home and sit down,” she said. “But as they say, peace is a process and not an event.”
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Near the end of her remarks, Gbowee told the audience who had brought her. The meeting, she said, was Boakai’s regular Rotary Club meeting at the Mamba Point Hotel, and Boakai was president of the club. Club members told Boakai and his guests to go outside, she said, and two other people followed them out.
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Each of the two gave her US$100 from their pockets, Gbowee said, and Boakai added US$300. She said he told the women to keep going and keep doing, for the legacy of peace in Liberia.
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She said Boakai might not remember the day.
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From the fish market to a national model
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Gbowee used the story to challenge the idea that the women who protested at the Fish Market in Monrovia had no plan.
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“Contrary to popular belief that we were a bunch of women who had no strategic direction, we had a direction,” she said.
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She said the women carried their campaign from the Fish Market to Totota in Bong County and across Grand Cape Mount, Grand Bassa, Nimba and Lofa counties “without any expertise and any degree in sustainable peace building.” When the peace talks moved to Accra, they stayed outside the room, she said, believing they could influence the outcome without being invited in. After the agreement was signed, they took it home, explained it to women in their communities and set benchmarks, and protested whenever those benchmarks were not met.
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To make the work outlast her generation, Gbowee said, she drew up a plan to build a Peace Hut in every community, modeled on the traditional palaver hut. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was the first donor, she said, and after efforts to secure land elsewhere fell through, the first Peace Hut was built in Totota. The model is now cited worldwide as an example of locally led peacebuilding.
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“Twenty-three years later, we have not gone back to war, not because Liberia is special,” she said. “It has taken a lot of work.”
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A call for a national peace day
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Madam Gbowee closed with a recommendation to the man she said had helped the movement in its early days.
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“You started the journey with us,” she told Boakai. “I recommend that the government of Liberia declare August 18 every year as Liberia Peace and Security Day.”
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Aug. 18 marks the signing of the 2003 Accra Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended Liberia’s civil war. Gbowee proposed that on that day, every school in the country teach the story of the peace so Liberians remember how it was won.
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“We must enshrine the work that the women have done, not just for this generation, but for the next,” she said.
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