Skidmore graduate wins inaugural Projects for Peace Alumni Award
Human rights and education activist Joseph Kaifala ’08, a Sierra Leonean who majored in French and international affairs at Skidmore College, is the inaugural recipient of the Projects for Peace Alumni Award.
A survivor of the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone, Kaifala has focused his career on peace, human rights, and rebuilding in his home country.
The newly created award grants up to $50,000 in support of the ongoing peacebuilding efforts of a past Projects for Peace recipient who demonstrates innovation and persistence in working for peace and transforming conflict.
As a Skidmore student, Kaifala was among the first cohort of Projects for Peace grant
recipients for his 2007 project, “Education as a Project for Peace in Sierra Leone:
Constructing a Library in Conakry-Dee.” A member of the inaugural class of Davis United World College Scholars at Skidmore, he went on to develop the Jeneba Project to provide educational opportunities for
girls in Sierra Leone.
He has since become the founder and principal of the Center for Memory and Reparations, which promotes remembrance and shared narratives about Sierra Leone’s civil war, and he has facilitated the construction of a memorial to that conflict and the marking of mass gravesites for its casualties.
“Joseph leads a life of service. He truly embodies the ideals of Projects for Peace,” says Chloe Jaleel, Skidmore’s coordinator of international student services. “Skidmore was honored to nominate Joseph for this recognition, and we are so excited that the Projects for Peace Alumni Award will support his ongoing work to bolster peace and justice in Sierra Leone.”
The award was announced by Projects for Peace and the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation at Middlebury College.
“Children were particularly affected by (the civil war in Sierra Leone), many of them conscripted as combatants,” Kaifala said. “Educational institutions were used as bases and vandalized. This is why my original Project for Peace was directed toward rebuilding educational infrastructure and providing scholarships to marginalized girls.”
In 2018, as part of the Jeneba Project, he led the construction of Sengbe Pieh Girls Excellence Academy, a high school for girls.
“We have removed many of the obstacles that force girls to drop out or not enroll,” said Kaifala, who earned a master’s degree in international relations from Syracuse University and a juris doctor from Vermont Law School.
Kaifala plans to use the award to expand opportunities for schoolchildren in Sierra Leone to visit the Civil War Memorial in Lungi. He says it’s important for students to learn about transitional justice mechanisms — the ways in which societies respond to legacies of massive and serious human rights violations — in order to promote a culture of peace and nonviolence.
Projects for Peace is a global program that encourages young adults to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues. Each year 100 or more student leaders from participating institutions are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a Project for Peace anywhere in the world.
