The Liberia Media for Democratic Initiatives (LMDI), the owner and runner of Liberia’s first and leading set of media and community outreach blended People to People platforms, THE DIALOGUE, DUCOR DEBATES & TOMORROW’S PEOPLE in partnership with the Central Bank of Liberia (CBL) has completed a seven month long series of 67 national public education and visibility engagement forums

on the bank’s general currency reform and the printing, minting, introduction and infusion of a new family of banknotes in the Liberian economy in particular.

This series of public engagement forums were a sequel to an earlier series of 32 public engagement forums conducted under the LMDI People to People Flagship platform, THE DIALOGUE, funded by the USAID Liberia Economic Policy Dialogue Activity (LEPDA) on the printing, introduction and infusion of the first batch of 100 (One Hundred) Liberian Dollar Banknotes preceding the ongoing old banknotes exchange for the rest of the new family of the New Liberian Banknotes.

During this second and seven month long series of public engagement forums organized, facilitated and moderated by the LMDI under its oldest and largest People to People platform named and styled THE DIALOGUE, the CBL represented by a team of the bank’s Technical Committee for Currency Reform (TCCR) and the Corporate Communications section accompanied the LMDI as guest panelists and presenters on the process of the ongoing currency replacement program.

The LMDI led CBL public engagement exercise took the team to at least four locations in every one of all the 15 counties of Liberia, gathering stakeholders of the currency reform and replacement process amounting to the conduct and completion of the total of 67 public forums at 67 locations across Liberia above the earlier proposed and projected 64 forums.

This second batch of public engagement forum series on the CBL currency reform started in September of 2022 with forums in Montserrado and later into all other counties.

The last leg of the LMDI/CBL public education and visibility engagement forums which concluded the public engagement exercise took the team to the eight hard to terrain counties of Liberia, namely, Gbarpolu, Lofa in the North and West, River Cess in the Central South and Sinoe, Grand Kru, Maryland, River Gee and Grand Gedeh Counties in the South East. The counties are hard to reach because of the notable bad roads especially during Liberia’s annual rainy season of March to October, but this season shifted to just about all year round due to apparent climate change on Liberia.

Throughout the public engagement campaign, stakeholders especially ordinary people decried the continuous presence of what they called huge mutilated banknotes of the two separate families of banknotes printed by the regimes of former presidents Charles Taylor and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

The people also cried out for lower denominations of the new family of Liberian banknotes and praised the CBL in particular and the Government of Liberia for minting and printing lower denominations in response to their cries.

At the moment people especially in faraway rural communities have called the CBL to ensure the speedy and mass distribution and infusion of all the seven denominations of the new family of Liberian Dollars as a way of easing financial transaction difficulties.

Our flagship platform, THE DIALOGUE, at this time, is in general association and partnership, and with the Central Bank of Liberia the USAID Liberia Economic Policy Dialogue Activity (LEPDA).