Editor's note: Journal Staff Writer Philip Marcelo will be traveling to Liberia in August to report on that country's progress 10 years after the end of a devastating civil war. This is the latest installment of an online and print series called "Rebuilding Liberia: The R.I. Connection." The project is funded by the International Center for Journalists, in Washington.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Fourteen years of near-interrupted civil war thoroughly destroyed Liberia's infrastructure.
The country lacks a substantive electrical grid. Less than 10 percent of residents in its capital and largest city have access to clean water. Roads, hospitals and other basic services are inadequate.
Rebuilding these public goods is a primary focus of Liberia's first post-conflict president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. It's also the nation's greatest challenge.
Without adequate infrastructure, Sirleaf has said, her administration's ability to significantly reduce poverty will be hindered, and the long-suffering country could again descend into chaos.
Sirleaf, reelected in 2012, has staked her second term on the promise of making Liberia a "middle income" country, or one where the per capita gross national income is roughly between $1,026 and $12, 475.
She believes rebuilding the country's infrastructure holds the key.
"Liberia's population is relatively small -- about four million -- and we are blessed with natural resources: minerals, agriculture, forestry, fisheries," Sirleaf said in a recent interview with "All Africa," an online news outlet.
"All of those things that can be transformed into growth and transformed into jobs and transformed into increased per capita income," she said. "Our big challenge is to realize the benefits from that endowment [through] infrastructure. If we can get roads and power and the ports functioning at a level of efficiency, we will be able to deliver."
I'll be writing more later about Liberia's energy and power problems. For now, I'll focus on perhaps the most basic necessity of all: clean water and sanitation.
A good primer on that issue has been a project launched in 2011 by The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting called "Waiting for Water," in which the Washington, D.C.-based center partnered with West African journalists.
Tecee Boley, a newspaper reporter in Liberia, has looked at how the country's slums -- particularly Monrovia's notorious West Point slum -- continue to lack access to clean water.
Boley says a recent World Bank study found E. coli in 58 percent of water sources across the capital city. And only around 8 percent of households in urban areas have piped water.
Her reporting suggests that little progress has been made since the World Health Organization, in 2008, found that just one in four Liberians has access to safe drinking water and as many as one in five deaths in Liberia could be traced to water and sanitation-related problems.
That's a sobering thought, as the nation enters its tenth consecutive year of peace.
How long can people remain content without access to something as basic as water?