Every year I choose a university student to accompany me on my win-a-trip journey, which is meant to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My 2025 winner is Sofia Barnett, a recent Brown University graduate and a budding journalist. Her first essay was about girls in West Africa challenging the tradition of female genital mutilation. Here’s her second, arguing that Western feminism should show more concern for global women’s issues.
By Sofia Barnett, reporting from Sierra Leone
In Makeni, Sierra Leone, girls walk home from school with notebooks tucked under their arms and dust clinging to their socks. Their uniforms are clean but faded. Their routes are long. I met girls who walk five miles through washed-out roads to reach a classroom. Their futures depend on a fragile calculation — not just of effort, but of what they’re willing to trade to keep learning.
Here, there are girls who drop out because they can’t afford a sanitary pad. Girls who sell their bodies for the cost of a notebook. Some are proud of what they earn at night — seven U.S. dollars, maybe — because it helps them stay enrolled. But that’s not opportunity. That’s extortion under the veil of agency.
Another young woman, Tity Sannoh, told me menstruation is often where the trade begins. In the coastal town of Tombo, girls rely on boyfriends just to manage their period, she said. “If you give them something, they will give you something in return.”
Safieyatu Kiadii, a 16-year-old girl from the village of Vonzua in Liberia, told me she dropped out of school after her father died. She now takes care of her mentally ill mother alone and lives with her in a one-room house. She isn’t ready to bear a child, she told me, lifting her sleeve to show the birth control implant in her arm. She wants to become a nurse.
When I asked how girls learn about their bodies, most said they don’t. Mabinty Thoronka, a 19-year-old from Freetown, told me her mother explained menstruation by saying only, “If you allow a boy to touch you, you are going to get pregnant.”