Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Roberta Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a womens peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Her efforts to end the war, along with her collaborator Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, helped usher in a period of peace and enabled a free election in 2005 that Sirleaf won. She, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for womens rights to full participation in peacebuilding work.

Leymah Gbowee was born in central Liberia onFebruary 1972. At the age of 17, she was living with her parents and two of her three sisters in Monrovia, when the First Liberian Civil War erupted in 1989, throwing the country into bloody chaos until 1996. As the war subsided she learned about a program run by UNICEF,... training people to be social workers who would then counsel those traumatized by war, wrote Gbowee in her 2011 memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers. She did a threemonth training, which led her to be aware of her own abuse at the hands of the father of her two young children, son Joshua Nuku and daughter Amber. Searching for peace and sustenance for her family, Gbowee followed her partner, called Daniel in her memoir, to Ghana where she and her growing family lived as virtually homeless refugees and almost starved. She fled with her three children, riding a bus on credit for over a week because I didnt have a cent, back to the chaos of Liberia, where her parents and other fami

Source: Wikipedia