How to turn your dissatisfaction into action

After the devastating rebel invasion of Freetown in 1999 and the Ebola epidemic in 2014, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, mayor of the city, refused to be paralyzed by her frustration with the status quo. Instead, she used her anger as a catalyst for action. In this inspiring talk, she shares how she transformed her city by taking the risks necessary to bring about dramatic change -- and shows how you can find power in your dissatisfaction.

Sometimes,

you have a negative feeling about things.

You're not happy
about the way things are going.

You feel frustrated and dissatisfied,

and so often, we choose to live with it.

It's a negative that
we tell ourselves we have to endure.

And yet, I passionately believe

that we all have the ability

to turn that negative feeling

into a positive

by allowing our dissatisfaction

to give birth to change.

On January 6, 1999,

I was working in London

when the news channels began to report

the rebel invasion of my hometown,

Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Thousands of people lost their lives,

and there were bodies
littering the streets of Freetown.

My husband's elderly aunt
was burned alive,

and I thought of my own two-year old

as I saw images of little children
with amputated limbs.

Colleagues said to me,

"How could we help?"

I didn't know,

so I began to call the telephone numbers
that came up on my screen

as international aid agencies
started to make appeals

to raise money to address the tragedy.

The vagueness of those telephone
conversations disappointed me.

It felt like the people
who were raising the money

seemed so far removed from the crisis,

and understandably so,

but I wasn't satisfied

and I wasn't convinced

that the interventions
they would eventually implement

would actually have the level of impact
that was so clearly needed.

There were butterflies
in my stomach for days

as I continued to watch
horrors unfold on television,

and I continuously asked myself,

what could I be doing?

What should I be doing?

What I wanted to do was to help
children affected by the war.

So that's what we did.

Myself, my sister and some friends

started the Sierra Leone
War Trust For Children, SLWT.

We decided to focus
on the thousands of displaced people

that fled the fighting

and were now living
in really poor, difficult conditions

in camps in Freetown.

Our work started with the Ross Road Camp

at the east end of the city.

Working with a local health organization,

we identified about 130
of the most vulnerable single mothers

with children under the age of five,

supporting them
by providing business skills,

microcredit,

whatever they asked us.

Working in those difficult conditions,

just getting the basics right,
was no small task,

but our collective sense
of dissatisfaction

at an unacceptable status quo

kept us focused on getting things done.

Some of those women went on
to open small businesses,

repaid their loans

and allowed other mothers
and their children

to have the same opportunity they did.

And we, we kept on going.

In 2004, we opened
an agricultural training center

for ex-child soldiers,

and when the war was behind us,

we started a scholarship program
for disadvantaged girls

who would otherwise not be able
to continue in school.

Today, Stella, one of those girls,

is about to qualify as a medical doctor.

It's amazing what a dose
of dissatisfaction can birth.

(Applause)

Ten years later, in 2014,

Sierra Leone was struck by Ebola.

I was working in Freetown at the time
on a hotel construction project on May 25

when the first cases were announced,

but I was back in London on July 30

when the state of emergency was announced,

the same day that many airlines
stopped their flights to Sierra Leone.

I remember crying for hours,

asking God, why this? Why us?

But beyond the tears,

I began to feel again

that profound sense of dissatisfaction.

So when, six months after
those first cases had been confirmed,

the disease was still spreading
rapidly in Sierra Leone

and the number of people
infected and dying continued to rise,

my level of frustration and anger

got so much that I knew I could not stay

and watch the crisis
from outside Sierra Leone.

So, in mid-November,

I said goodbye to my much loved

and very understanding
husband and children,

and boarded a rather empty plane

to Freetown.

Freetown was now
the epicenter of the outbreak.

There were hundreds
of new cases every week.

I spoke to many medical experts,

epidemiologists

and ordinary people every day.

Everyone was really scared.

"We won't succeed until we're talking
to people under the mango tree."

So said Dr. Yoti,

a Ugandan doctor who worked for WHO

and who had been involved
in pretty much every Ebola outbreak

in Africa previously.

He was right,

and yet there was no plan
to make that happen.

So during a weekend in early December,

I developed a plan that became known
as the Western Area Surge plan.

We needed to talk with people,

not at people.

We needed to work
with the community influencers

so people believed our message.

We needed to be talking
under the mango tree,

not through loudspeakers.

And we needed more beds.

The National Ebola Response Center, NERC,

built on and implemented that plan,

and by the third week of January,

the number of cases
had fallen dramatically.

I was asked to serve

as a new Director of Planning for NERC,

which took me right across the country,

trying to stay ahead of the outbreak

but also following it

to remote villages in the provinces

as well as to urban slum communities.

On one occasion, I got out of my car

to call for help for a man
who had collapsed on the road.

I accidentally stepped in liquid

that was coming down the road
from where he lay.

I rushed to my parents' house,

washed my feet in chlorine.

I'll never forget waiting
for that man's test results

as I constantly checked my temperature
then and throughout the outbreak.

The Ebola fight was probably
the most challenging

but rewarding experience of my life,

and I'm really grateful

for the dissatisfaction

that opened up the space

for me to serve.

Dissatisfaction can be
a constant presence in the background,

or it can be sudden,

triggered by events.

Sometimes it's both.

With my hometown, that's the way it was.

For years, our city had changed,

and it had caused me great pain.

I remember a childhood

growing up climbing trees,

picking mangoes and plums

on the university campus
where my father was a lecturer.

Went fishing in the streams
deep in the botanical gardens.

The hillsides around Freetown
were covered with lush green vegetation,

and the beaches were clean and pristine.

The doubling of the population of Freetown
in the years that followed the civil war,

and the lack of planning
and building control

resulted in massive deforestation.

The trees, the natural beauty,
were destroyed as space was made

for new communities, formal or informal,

and for the cutting down of firewood.

I was deeply troubled and dissatisfied.

It wasn't just the destruction
of the trees and the hillsides

that bothered me.

It was also the impact of people,

as infrastructure failed to keep up
with the growth of the population:

no sanitation systems to speak of,

a dirty city with typhoid,
malaria and dysentery.

I didn't know the statistics at the time,

but it turned out that by 2017,

only six percent of liquid waste
and 21 percent of solid waste

was being collected.

The rest was right there with us,

in backyards, in fields, rivers

and deposited in the sea.

The steps to address that deep sense
of anger and frustration I felt

didn't unfold magically or clearly.

That's not how the power
of dissatisfaction works.

It works when you know
that things can be done better,

and it works when you decide to take
the risks to bring about that change.

And so it was that in 2017

I ended up running for mayor,

because I knew things could be better.

It seemed the people agreed with me,
because I won the election.

(Applause)

Today, we are implementing
an ambitious plan

to transform our city,

and when I say we,

what gets me really excited

is that I mean
the whole Freetown community,

whether it's being part of competitions
like rewarding the neighborhood

that makes the most improvement
in overall cleanliness,

or whether it's our programs

that are leading and joining
people and waste collectors

through our apps.

In Freetown today,

it's a much cleaner city,

and those trees
that we're so well known for,

we planted 23,000 of them
last rainy season.

(Applause)

And in 2020,

we plan to plant a million trees as part
of our "Freetown the Tree Town" campaign.

(Applause)

Sometimes, sometimes we have
a negative feeling about things.

We're not happy about
the way things are going.

We feel dissatisfied,

and we feel frustrated.

We can change that negative
into a positive.

If you believe that things can be better,

then you have the option to do something
rather than to do nothing.

The scale and circumstances
of our situations will differ,

but for each of us,

we all have one thing in common.

We can take risks to make a difference,

and I will close in saying,

step out,

take a risk.

If we can unite behind
the power of dissatisfaction,

the world will be a better place.

Thank you.

(Applause)