The sea continues to wash away at homes in the township. Credit: NEW NARRATIVES
WEST POINT, Monrovia-When the sea turns rough, Elizabeth Gray and her family have nowhere to run. Water floods through their home in this low-lying informal settlement, forcing her three children to relieve themselves indoors while waves crash just meters from their door.
By Joyclyn Wea with New Narratives
As this year’s rainy season gets underway, the family lives in terror. They’ve already lost one house to the sea. Four years ago, the ocean swallowed Gray’s four-room home along with everything inside. Now they live in constant fear that her current dwelling, where seawater regularly floods the floors during rough weather, will be next. Sea levels are rising slowly, but it’s the rainy season, and ocean surges that come with storms, that is taking houses now.
“Our children are not safe,” Gray, 29, says in a recent interview. “Now the sea is giving us a hard time, and we don’t have anywhere apart from this house.”
Gray’s story illustrates the human cost of a climate change adaptation project that has stalled because of failures of Liberia’s government. The Monrovia Metropolitan Climate Resilience Project was designed to protect 250,000 residents from exactly this kind of devastation. But annual progress reports from the Green Climate Fund – the global donor pool that was to fund two thirds of the costs of the project – show that failures of the administration of President George Weah delayed the project for years.
The Weah administration had allegedly diverted millions to fund the 2023 elections. People here received bags of rice from representatives of Weah’s political party. But the election campaign meant little to more than a dozen families here like Musa Bamba. As sea levels surged during storms in the rainy season that led up to the 2023 poll, his 12-room house – home to 6 members of his family – slipped into the sea.
Coastal Defense Project Hailed as a Triumph by Government
The project should have been a triumph of international cooperation. Launched in 2021 by then-Monrovia mayor, Jefferson Koijee, the project secured $17.2 million from the Green Climate Fund and another $1.6 million from the United Nations Development Program. The project’s design would see a so-called “revetment”, placing massive rocks along the shoreline to hold back the sea for at least 40 years.
It was Liberia’s biggest grant to date from the world’s largest climate adaptation fund. Started in the wake of the 2021 Paris Agreement, the Green Climate Fund took money from heavilyy polluting rich countries to help developing nations adapt to the rapidly changing climate. The government of President George Weah agreed to contribute $6.8 million—one quarter of the total cost. Just $2 million was to be paid in cash, with the rest coming “in kind” – mostly in the form of rocks that would be sourced from Mount Coffee and brought to West Point.
Elizabeth Gray, mother of three has already lost one house to the sea. Now she fears to lose another. Credit: New Narratives
But over three years, the Weah administration contributed just $50,000 total in cash, according to the Green Climate Fund’s 2023 annual performance report, roughly 2.5 percent of the $2 million it had promised.
“Insufficient co-financing provided by the Government of Liberia” caused “significant” delays, the fund’s 2023 report stated. Annual reporting in 2022 blamed delays on the government’s slow pace in appointing project management staff, something that plagued another Green Climate Fund project in Liberia – the $10 million Climate Information Systems project that would have warned millions of farmers and flood victims of weather hazards ahead of time.
In a phone interview Samuel Tweah, who served as Weah’s finance minister, acknowledged the government’s failure but blamed it on the COVID-19 pandemic. “Under the circumstances, it was just difficult. People were staying home, we had to pay government workers, and all those things,” Tweah said.
But the delays extended well beyond the pandemic and the lockdowns that ended in late 2021. As 2023 went on, the Green Climate Fund report said, the government became increasingly focused on “the 2023 presidential and legislative elections.” New Narratives/Front Page Africa reporting has found that in the run-up to the elections, funds were diverted from almost every government entity. The anti-human trafficking unit in the Ministry of Labor, for instance, saw 90 percent of the $230,000 allotted to it in the annual budget diverted, allegedly, to fund the elections. Tweah and two other top government officials were dismissed from their jobs after being placed on the US Treasury’s Sanctions List, accused of corruption.
Without Government Funding Project Activities Slowed to a Crawl
The funding structure was designed to be straightforward: government contributions would unlock larger international disbursements, a common mechanism to ensure recipient countries remain invested in project success. Without Liberia’s share, the project slowed to a crawl. No more Global Climate funds were sent.
The Green Climate Fund 2023 report revealed multiple attempts by international officials and EPA staff to engage Liberia’s Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. “Several discussions were held to ensure that GoL’s full cash co-financing commitment is captured in GoL’s annual national budgetary allocation,” the report said. These efforts proved unsuccessful.
In an interview Weah government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) executive director Wilson Tarpeh said he regretted the failures. “Based on the work plan, we did not obtain what should have been done at the time I was there,” said Tarpeh. “Of course, it’s painful. It’s painful when you go to West Point. You see what the people are doing and you see a situation where you go in and out of the Ministry of Finance. I don’t want to say I am blaming the Ministry of Finance; that’s a government work so we take full responsibility for it.”
“Our government should have done what needed to be done, and we didn’t do that,” said Wilson Tarpeh, executive director of the Environmental Protection Agency under the Weah administration.
In West Point, Tarpeh’s expression of regret found little sympathy. After seeing 800 houses – home to 6500 people – washed away in the years leading up to the 2021 project launch, they thought a solution was coming. But as years passed, and houses kept disappearing, they lost hope.
Thomas Tweh, Township Focus person for the coastal defense project Credit: New Narratives
The government “did not have the political will,” said William C. Wea, former West Point commissioner, shaking his head.
Beyond West Point: A Looming National Crisis
The stalled project is just one part of what will need to be a massive effort to protect or relocate an estimated 230,000 Liberians who will lose their homes to the sea by 2100, at current levels of global warming, according to United Nations Environment Program data. Projections suggest the coast could move 190 meters inland by the end of the decade.
Already, 0.8 square km of land has been lost in recent decades due to coastal erosion, impacting infrastructure and nearby population centers. In the Greater Monrovia area alone, a predicted 16 cm sea level rise by 2030 would put at risk 675,000 people and 9,500 hectares of land.
West Point has been particularly hard hit. It’s not just homes. Many of the large fishing community lost their livelihoods as boats and equipment washed away.
“For those who have broken canoes and lost their canoes, it’s almost like they have to sit with somebody in their canoes and join with somebody,” said Thomas Tweh, the township’s focal person for the project. “And if they don’t find someone to allow them to go fishing with them, they too will not go fishing for a season or a month, or a week.”
A New Government’s Inheritance
The election of President Joseph Boakai in late 2023 offered new hope for the stalled project. In an interview, Urey Yarkpawolo, the new EPA executive director, claimed that the current government has “met all the benchmarks to unlock the GCF funding” and secured additional government contributions – $500,000 was released on December 31, 2024, with another $500,000 approved in the 2025 budget.
UNDP Liberia representative Kuukpen confirmed the Boakai administration is now up to date with payments. The 2025 payment is due by October this year. Construction – starting with a road from Kru Beach to Lower West Point to bring the rocks – is expected to begin soon.
“I would say this year and next year, we will see some results,” Yarkpawolo said.
But when construction begins, there are still questions for the community here. One thousand residents will need to be moved to make way for the road.
The UNDP’s Kuukpen made clear that the government would be separately responsible for providing relocation assistance for displaced residents. People in the community say they have accepted the home demolitions are necessary. But they are waiting to see exactly which homes it will be and what the government will offer them.
In a WhatsApp response, project manager Zienu Kanneh acknowledged that there are no answers for community members yet. He said a “Resettlement Action Plan” and Livelihood Restoration Plan” are not completed. But he promised that “all of the questions will be answered once those plans are developed.”
But, for residents like Gray, the renewed promises feel familiar. It’s now four years since Mayor Koijee promised relief was coming soon. “They brought a yellow machine here and all to come see the area, but at the end of the day, we didn’t see anything,” she said.
Oretha Wleh, another West Point resident who lost her house, in front her rented zinc shack that is also threatened by storm surges. Credit New Narratives
As the rainy season gets underway, Gray faces daily reminders of her vulnerability. She spends $LD120 daily, (US60cents) for her family to bathe at paid facilities. West Point lacks any sanitation infrastructure.
“It is worrisome to us. Depending on the degree of the rain, you cannot walk here, the place gets flooded, and feces come back into the town,” Leona Monger, a resident of the township, said. “As a government, be truthful to your citizens; do not scatter their expectations.”
“I am only begging the government to help,” Gray said. “We are begging them, we’re appealing to them to help because right now we are already in the rain.”
This story is part one of a two-part series. Part two will explore the next steps for the Coastal Defense Project now that funding has been restored. This series was a collaboration with New Narratives as part of the Investigating Liberia project. The Swedish Embassy in Liberia provided funding. The funder had no say in the story’s content.
