MBBI Peacebuilder of the Year 2023: Klubosumo Johnson Borh

Klubosumo Johnson Borh is the 2023 MBBI Peacebuilder of the Year for his efforts in Liberia, specifically trauma healing and psychosocial support for Liberian ex-combatants. He has also been actively engaged in the MBBI Sierra Leone project for years and has recently become the Team Leader. 

Furthermore, Borh is a 2021 Rainer Arnhold Fellow of Social Entrepreneur/Social Innovator, and now a 2023 Youth Empowerment Fellow of The Agency Fund. He is a Paul Harris Fellow of the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International. He is a Rotary International Global Vocational Trainer. A social and development worker, a reintegration, psychosocial, and youth development specialist. He uses field experience to develop rigorous social and development programs and projects that address former child soldiers’ rehabilitation, hard-risk youth violence, and organized crime, extreme poverty in developing countries. He influences public policy and high-impact program design for scale-up. He has delivered innovative psychosocial initiatives, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, and Cash Transfers for rehabilitation and social and economic reintegration support for former child soldiers and at-risk street youth. He connects rigorous academic theory with real-world practice conducting cutting-edge research and developing innovative solutions to support governments and organizations around the world to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. He has developed and implemented programs in West and East Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Guinea, Uganda, and Kenya), Asia (India), North America, and, most recently, at the United Nations. Mr. Borh has served as the Reintegration Consultant (UN Index # 10126543) for the Global Coalition for the Reintegration of Child Soldiers at the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict at the United Nations in New York.

Mr. Borh has developed and implemented several programs in Liberia and elsewhere. But the heart and soul of Borh program is the Sustainable Transformation of Youth in Liberia (STYL) Project. STYL is an eight-week group therapy that works for the most high-risk youth in Liberia. The program seemed successful, but to be sure of the STYL’s impact, Borh teamed up with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and researchers Christopher Blattman from the University of Chicago, Margaret Sheridan from Harvard Medical School, and Julian C. Jamison from the World Bank to test the STYL approach. What the researchers found was amazing. STYL led to significant decreases in crime, drug use, and violence for participants.  STYL has been featured in news outlets, including the New York Times and National Public Radio, the Washington Post, and on the influential podcast Freakonomics, highlighting NEPI’s success in identifying a workable and affordable solution to rehabilitating the hardest-to-reach youth. The findings are reported in “Reducing crime and violence: Experimental evidence from behavior change and cash transfers” http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2594868). Mr. Borh has also developed the Chronic Absenteeism Assessment Project (CAAP) in collaboration with other scientists like Dr. Yanis Ben Amor and Justine Dowden at the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) Earth Institute, Columbia University http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2015/05/04/49720/. (http://csd.columbia.edu/what-we-do/youth-empowerment-programs/, www.yuvanestham.org, www.eminyeeto.org. CAAP is a sample biometric approach to measuring student chronic absenteeism toward reducing school dropout. CAAP has been published in the International Journal of Educational Development, and Mr. Borh is a co-author. Content is available on ScienceDirect. Mr. Borh is also a co-author of the book Integrative Social Work Practice with Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Forcibly Displaced Persons.

Borh has an MSc. Degree from the Columbia University School of Social Work with a concentration in Social Enterprise Administration (SEA/Management Fellow Program) and Field of Practice in International Social Welfare. Mr. Borh also has a BSc Degree in Economics from the African Methodist Episcopal Zion University College, a diploma from the Advanced International Training Program in Human Rights, Peace and Security sponsored by Sweden International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and implemented by Indevelop in Stockholm and Cambodia. He is a MANGO and USAID-trained financial manager with several certificates in leadership and peace studies. Borh is the Founder and CEO of the Network for Empowerment and Progressive Initiative – NEPI (http://www.nepiliberia.org), a 501(c)(3), tax-exempt, charitable (EIN # 81-3844173) organization under the Nonprofit Corporation Act of the State of New York since 2016 dedicated to creating a society free from youth crime and violence. Here is a two pager about NEPI.

Connect with Borh here: Klubosumo J. Borh on LinkedIn | NEPI on Twitter | Klubosumo J. Borh on Twitter