Foreign Relations
Critical Issues
- Establish reform and renewal of MFA as a national security priority.
Equipment of Foreign Policy Apparatus for Liberia’s Foreign Policy making and implementation
- Establish uniform management practices, techniques, and standards at home office and missions.
- Reform MFA’s selection and recruitment of personnel to attract the best and brightest to serve, expand professional development opportunities with an emphasis on leadership training, writing skills, and making the Ministry’s promotion system more responsive to outstanding personnel, and enhancing the quality of life the MFA provides its mission staff.
Create promotional incentives to attract top FSOs and establish within MFA a legislative affairs bureau with an ambassador as head
- Expand MFA’s engagement with the private sector, both at home and abroad.
Clarify Interagency Relationships and Distribution of Responsibilities on Liberia’s Foreign Policy development and execution
- Strengthen the coordinating authority that ambassadors exercise over officials representing the numerous government ministries and agencies operating out of our embassies.
Grant ambassadors’ greater input into the resource decisions concerning the activities at their missions and for facilitating all agencies in their host countries
Improve and sustain consultations with the Executive Branch, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, business/private sector, and NGOs on issues of mutual interest and Liberia’s foreign policy development and execution
Centralize authority over administration and budget in the DMA who will also be responsible for the synchronization of priorities and initiatives of Liberia’s foreign policy
- Modernize MFA communications and information management infrastructure.
- Rationalize, renovate, and secure MFA’s physical infrastructure, both overseas and at home.
- Establish an Overseas Facilities Authority Office in MFA.
Strengthen authority of Ambassadors over coordination and oversight of oversee resources and personnel deployed to their missions
- Improve Ministry’s professional culture for effective public outreach and public diplomacy.
- Reassert the Minister of Foreign Affair’s role as the president’s principal adviser and spokesman on foreign policy for the president and his administration.
- Grant ambassadors’ greater authority to return personnel to their home offices.
- Instruct all agencies and ministries to treat performance evaluations by ambassadors concerning personnel deployed to their embassies as a principal evaluation; and
