In this interview Jessica Bimba, Virginia Lighe, Sudacious Varney, and Veekie Wilson explain the process used to remove ghost workers from Liberia's teacher payroll, review qualifications, and test functional literacy in English and math. This exercise began in 2015 with a pilot project and concluded in 2017. The interview briefly discusses the creation of a project implementation unit and then outlines the steps taken to explain the process, identify "ghosts," check qualifications, administer the test, and issue a biometric id. The participants explain the rationale behind several important decisions. They also talk about some of the challenges they faced and how they addressed them. 

In this interview Sadacious Varney focuses on the management of the payroll audit for the Liberia Education Ministry teaching and vetting project supported by Big Win Philanthropies. 

In this interview, Gbovadeh Gbilia discusses his work on reforming Liberia’s teaching service and expunging ghosts from its payroll. He begins by examining his time as a senior technical advisor at the Civil Service Agency, what he learned there and how he was able to bring lessons from reforms he assisted there to his new role in the Ministry of Education. He goes on to outline the framework of the reform process, with emphasis on how to secure buy-in from governmental stakeholders, reform participants and donors. Throughout the interview, he discusses how his team secured the wins that made the reform relatively successful, and how they overcame the challenges such bold reforms are bound to face.

In this interview, Dr. Mosoka P. Fallah, who played a key role in the Montserrado Incident Management System, discusses the evolution of the Ebola response in Liberia. He explains the failure of the initial top-down approach in city districts like West Point, where distrust of the government led to violence and a largely ineffective attempt to contain the spread of Ebola. Fallah goes on to describe the process of developing a bottom-up approach, known as the community-based initiative, which engaged local leaders to find cases and build knowledge about the disease neighbor to neighbor. He also provides insight into how a lack of resources and coordination among various supporting NGOs and government teams led to a prolonged epidemic in Liberia.

In this interview, Colonel Qazi Ullah, Deputy Chief for Integrated Support Services at UNMIL and a Bangladeshi military logistician. Colonel Ullah begins by describing the initial challenges of coordinating the logistics of a 35-agency response effort for Ebola. He then details a variety of specific logistics problems he dealt with and the innovative solutions he and his team were able to design, relating to issues such as Priority Procurement Lists for donors, warehouse management, shipping and helicopters, and cold storage challenges for medical supplies. Finally, Col. Ullah concludes by reflecting on the overall logistical successes in the management of the Ebola crisis, offering lessons learned and best practices going forward. 

In this interview, Jana Telfer describes how she became involved in the Ebola response in Liberia in 2014 when a CDC colleague recommended she come to assist the Liberian government in a risk communication approach to the crisis. When she arrived in September, she says, 60 different NGOs were working on 250 different projects. Along a similar vein, communications strategy lacked structure and there were simply too many voices to establish a coherent message. In the end, through coordination facilitated by the national Incident Management System (IMS), Liberia developed the most sophisticated Ebola message manual of the three affected countries: Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. She explains that the messaging took an upward turn when traditional chiefs became involved in message dissemination, resulting in more significant behavior change in their respective communities.

In this interview, Saah Charles N’Tow describes his roles as program director for the President’s Young Professional Program (PYPP) and John Snow Inc.’s (JSI) Scott Family Liberia Fellows Program. He talks about the process of designing a two-year fellowship program to bring young Liberians into key government ministries and agencies. He explains the creation of a selection criteria for fellows and the procedures that ensured the applicant-screening process remained transparent and fair. He discusses how the program held support sessions for applicants focused on resume writing and interview preparation. He addresses the program’s coordination practices with donors on budget support. He notes instances of resistance against the program from ministries and agencies and describes how the program responded to problems arising from the placement of fellows. He highlights the program’s administrative components that included mentoring, training, performance management, and program immersion. Finally, he describes the importance of sustainable funding procedures and talks about the likelihood of continued support for the program through future administrations

In this interview, Chea Sanford Wesseh describes early challenges to the Ebola response in Liberia. As the head of contact tracing in the national incident management system (IMS) during the 2014-2015 outbreak, he provides insight into the initial lack of resources and training that affected the country’s response. Throughout, Wesseh emphasizes that every aspect of a response, from contact tracing to case management to burial, must be properly functioning for the response to be effective. He explains the role of contact tracers and how that role shifted as the response came to include community members as active case finders, also giving the contextual background that led to this shift in the response. Reflecting on the operation as a whole, Wesseh outlines aspects of the response that shifted to create an effective Ebola response in Liberia. 

In this interview, acting head of the Communication for Development Unit of UNICEF prior to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, Adolphus Scott describes how conflicting messages circulating in the community hindered the Ministry of Health’s attempts to control the virus. He explains the process of coming up with one set of messages among key actors that was then distributed in the form of posters, short dramas, and radio messages. Scott also tells about the troubling and limiting narrative against the government airing on about 22 radio stations toward the beginning of the outbreak saying that the government to secure more funding fabricated Ebola. Eventually, he says, they came on board and worked with UNICEF and the Ministry of Health to circulate their Ebola is Real program, a campaign complete with a popular song around July 2014. Scott also provides a brief overview of the new Incident Management System’s Social Mobilization Working Group, which worked to engage communities in the fight against Ebola. He also stresses the importance of conversing with and learning from community leaders early on and justifies the regret he feels about how late in the timeline the organizations met with religious and traditional leaders.

Mary Mulbah and Samuel Johnson were teachers’ union leaders at the time of the interview. They explain the basis of their opposition to a ghost-worker removal and teacher certification effort carried out by Liberia’s Ministry of Education in 2017, with support from Big Win Philanthropy. The stated purpose of that program was to improve the quality of education in Liberia’s schools. At the time the project started, the Ministry of Education also launched a separate experimental program with the international for-profit network of schools, Bridge Academies, to manage several model schools. The union opposed the Bridge Academies initiative, and the objections carried over to the program to remove ghost workers and require testing and re-training of teachers some teachers. This interview helps readers understand the teachers’ union view of the vetting program. This interview was edited to reduce repetition and provide clarifying information.