Source: United Nations (Video News)
Superintendent Zainab Gbla of Sierra Leone has been awarded the 2024 UN Woman Police Officer of the Year for her innovative community engagement initiatives that helped strengthen relations between host communities and the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA). In an area that had no schools when she arrived, she initiated an educational program, providing materials and visual aids for teaching disadvantaged children. She also established a mentorship program for girls. Projects she also initiated to support crop cultivation and livestock sale at the local markets gave the women sustainable sources of income, allowing them to provide for their families and send their children to school in Abyei town.
Currently serving as UNISFA’s Chief Police Training Officer, Chief Superintendent Gbla spent her teenage years displaced within her home country of Sierra Leone and later as a refugee in Guinea – experiences that motivated her to enter the police service and to empower women affected, like her, by conflict.