Mr. Barry Andrews:

Given that we have been there for 15 years and 90% of our staff are local people from Sierra Leone, we have very close connections with the community, local government and the ministry of health. We are very well positioned to understand how to gain the trust of local people to respond as best we can. There is a debate about whether NGOs should scale up and the British Government has called on NGOs to scale up and provide a better response. MSF has also called on NGOs to scale up. Some of our representatives were in Washington during the week and the US Government has specifically requested that GOAL assist in this. We are a very trusted emergency partner with these key donors and have responded to every major disaster over the past 30 or 40 years. The fact that we have history in Sierra Leone gives us a certain traction with the community and local authorities and we hope to build on it and meet the challenge.