Marie Stopes Sierra Leone started providing services in 1986 and is one of the oldest programmes in the Marie Stopes International partnership. We have a long and proud history in the country and are known locally as “de mammy fo welbodi” or “the mother of health”. The programme continued to work through both the decade long civil war (the only NGO to do so) and the 2015 Ebola outbreak. The country continues to face many challenges: life expectancy is just 45 and the country has one of the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality. Marie Stopes Sierra Leone is the country’s largest family planning organisation, with teams working in every one of the country’s 14 districts and providing more than half of all contraception. Despite all of the progress in the country, just 21% of women aged 15-49 are using a method of modern contraception