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"Our Men Can Stop Violence": Inside LEWAF's Sengbe Pieh MenCare Group
Gender Equity Team8 July 2026
Ask a man how he'd feel if someone battered his own mother, and the answer is always the same: revenge. LEWAF's MenCare program turns that instinct into a campaign against domestic violence.
Men are the majority perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence — but LEWAF's mobilization campaigns start from a different premise: men are also uniquely positioned to stop it. During community outreach, LEWAF's Gender Equity team asks men one simple, pointed question: as a son or brother, how would you feel if another man battered your own mother or sister? The answer is always the same — "I will revenge."
That instinct to protect the women in one's own family is the starting point LEWAF builds on. After walking men through the real consequences of violence — legal, social, and generational — 31 men in one community chose to organize formally, adopting the name "MenCare," styled after Sengbe Pieh, the Mende man who led the historic Amistad revolt and remains a Sierra Leonean symbol of resistance to injustice.
Economic Empowerment as the Hook
To keep the group engaged and give it staying power, LEWAF applied the same Economic Empowerment approach used with its women's savings groups: the MenCare group was supplied with its own savings toolkit and now meets weekly to save money, just as the women's CWSLA groups do. It's at these same weekly meetings that men receive structured training on gender roles and expectations, the consequences of gender-based violence, and the specific provisions of Sierra Leone's Domestic Violence Act, Sexual Offences Act, and property rights laws.
Their T-shirts carry the campaign's message plainly on the back: "Our Men Can Stop Violence — Engage Them."
The MenCare group has since organized two community-wide campaigns raising awareness on sexual and gender-based violence — men speaking to other men, in the language and logic that reaches them, about why silence and complicity are no longer acceptable in their own communities.
It's a small but telling shift: violence against women is often treated as a "women's issue" to be solved by women's programs. LEWAF's MenCare group is a bet that lasting change also requires men to organize, save, learn, and speak up — for their mothers, their sisters, and their daughters.
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