Zainab Bangura

Bangura became a social activist during the difficult period when Sierra Leone was ruled by the NPRC military junta. She began with consciousness-raising efforts among urban market women, reminding her followers that her own mother was a market woman. In 1994 she founded Women Organized for a Morally Enlightened Nation (W.O.M.E.N.), the first non-partisan women's rights group in the country. The following year she co-founded the Campaign for Good Governance (CGG). Then, using CGG as her platform, she campaigned for the holding of national elections that finally drove the NPRC from power in 1996 and restored democratic government. This was Sierra Leone's first democratic election in 25 years, and the Sierra Leonean media and the general public attributed that success largely to her efforts.

During Sierra Leone's civil war (1991–2002) Bangura spoke out forcefully against the atrocities committed against the civilian population by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was targeted for assassination several times by that group. She also spoke against the corruption in the civilian government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and the atrocities committed against civilians by government soldiers. In June 1997, as fighting engulfed the country, Bangura fled on a fishing boat to neighboring Guinea.[9]

In the 2002 elections, Bangura ran against Kabbah for the presidency of Sierra Leone, departing for the first time from her accustomed role as a non-partisan civil society activist. She won less than one percent of the vote, and her Movement for Progress (MOP) party failed to gain any seats in Sierra Leone's parliament. Bangura claimed that her party's low vote count resulted from corruption in the voting system.

After the 2002 elections Bangura founded the National Accountability Group (NAG) whose mission was to fight against official corruption and to promote transparency and accountability in government. In 2006 she left Sierra Leone for neighbouring Liberia where she was appointed Director of the Civil Affairs Office in the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) and given responsibility for the reconstruction of 16 Liberian ministries and 30 government agencies following that country's devastating civil war.

Bangura returned to Sierra Leone in 2007 after Ernest Bai Koroma won the presidency in a hard-fought national election and was named foreign minister shortly thereafter. At the time, many Sierra Leoneans believed that the new president elevated this well known critic of government to such a high position to demonstrate his good faith in promising reform.

As a devoted Muslim, Bangura took time off politics in 2009 to travel to the Holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to participate in the 2009 Hajj pilgrimage ceremony.[10]

In 2012, Bangura served on the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, which was jointly chaired by Goodluck Jonathan and Jens Stoltenberg, and issued recommendations to increase access to and use of 13 essential commodities for women’s and children’s health.[11]

Bangura subsequently assumed her next position as Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict at the level of Under-Secretary-General on 4 September 2012. In this capacity, she also chaired the interagency network UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict.[12] During her time in office, she helped launch an international protocol in 2014 for dealing with rape and sexual violence in conflict, providing guidelines on the investigation of sex crimes and the collection of evidence for future prosecutions.[13] She notably negotiated a June 2015 deal with military commanders in Ivory Coast to prosecute soldiers accused of sexual violence.[14] That same year, she visited Iraq and Syria and worked on an action plan to address the sexual violence being waged by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) fighters.[15]

From 2018 until 2019, Bangura co-chaired (alongside Katherine Sierra) an Independent Commission on Sexual Misconduct, Accountability and Culture Change at Oxfam.[16] In 2019, Guterres appointed her as Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi, succeeding Maimunah Mohd Sharif.[17]