"The title is Minister. The work is much bigger than that."
I show up in government offices, lecture halls, community meetings, international forums, and occasionally places with no electricity and very muddy roads. The work goes where it needs to go.
"People sometimes ask me what a typical day looks like. The honest answer is: there is no typical day. One morning I'm reviewing legislation. The afternoon I'm in a community listening session three hours outside Freetown. The evening I'm on a call with a UN partner. And somewhere in between, I'm thinking about the women from Moyamba and asking myself whether today's work moved the needle for them."
— Isata, on what the work actually looks like
Government. Academia. Civil Society. These aren't separate chapters of my career — they are three lenses through which I see the same problem, and three platforms from which I work on the same solution.
As Minister, I am responsible for the national strategy on gender equality and child protection. That means legislation, budgets, partnerships, programmes. It means standing in parliament and making the case for policies that don't always have easy political support. It means persuading, negotiating, building coalitions.
But it also means — and this matters to me — getting out of Freetown. Getting into communities. Hearing directly from the women and children our work is supposed to serve. I refuse to govern from a desk.
I represent Sierra Leone at regional and international forums — the AU, ECOWAS, the UN. I take our priorities into those rooms and I bring back partnerships and resources that serve the people at home. That translation between global commitments and local realities is some of the most important work I do.
Women leading climate resilience in their own communities. This is what it looks like when we stop treating women as beneficiaries and start treating them as leaders.
"I never make a policy decision without asking: will this reach the woman who can't read? The child in the village with no road? If the answer is no, we're not done yet."
— Isata
At the University of Sierra Leone and the University of Makeni, I taught economics — Econometrics, Sustainable Economic Development, Research Methodology. And I loved it. Not just because of the subjects, but because of what it meant to put rigorous analytical tools in the hands of the next generation of Sierra Leonean thinkers and leaders.
My academic work and my policy work were never separate. The research informed the advocacy. The advocacy shaped the questions I brought into the classroom. They fed each other — and they still do.
How to measure what actually matters — and make the numbers tell the truth.
Because growth that destroys the future isn't growth. It's theft.
Possibly the most important thing I taught: how to ask a better question.
My years at WANEP-Sierra Leone as National Network Coordinator were the most formative of my professional life. Not because they were the most prominent — they weren't. But because they took me deepest into the reality of what peace and conflict look like at the human level.
I coordinated early warning systems. I facilitated community mediations. I worked with women's groups building quiet, invisible bridges between people who had every reason to stay divided. And I saw, over and over again, that the women doing this work were the most capable peacebuilders in the room — and the least resourced.
That experience is burned into everything I do now. Every time I fight for Women, Peace and Security at the international level, I'm fighting for those women — the ones I worked alongside in communities far from any headline.
Monitoring conflict triggers before they escalate.
Because peace built without women doesn't hold.
The slow, hard, essential work of helping people choose dialogue.
Making sure people know what they're entitled to — and how to claim it.
The work requires partnership — with communities, institutions, and organizations that share the values.
The work starts with a vision. Here's mine.