There are about 2,753,000 million children living in Sierra Leone out of a population of some 5,700,000 and around 70% of them live in poverty, particularly in rural areas. According to the United Nations, Sierra Leone has the world’s highest mortality rates for children under the age of five and few children can expect to live longer than 56 years. Literacy rates for Sierra Leone boys is about 46.9% but drops significantly to just 24.4% for female children.

These facts are disturbing in themselves however should be seen against the background of the Sierra Leone civil war which, when it finally ended in early 2002, had left over a third of the country's population displaced, tens of thousands dead, infrastructure including thousands of schools just piles of rubble and the nation left emotionally scarred for generations not least the country's children, thousands of whom had been forced, under pain of death, to become killer child soldiers.