Poverty has been decisively found as one the key contributing factors to the brutal 14-year long civil conflict that ravaged Liberia between 1989 to 2003. In June 2011, a research by the HUMAN RIGHTS CENTER of the University of California, Berkeley - School of Law, Poverty was found to be the third most prominent cause of the civil war. The war destroyed the country’s systems and infrastructures. It obliterated the access to already struggling public services making them non-existent. Recovery has been a slow gruesome process that might take several decades to achieve, if ever.

Liberia journalist Matthew Nyanplu provides insights in how poverty is a governance strategy.