Bo Waterside, Liberia---Clinging to cheap kitchenware and the hope of a better life, Fatima Kamara hawks her goods to travellers when she should probably be doing her homework.
The 16-year-old keeps her family afloat by selling at the main crossing point between her native Liberia and Sierra Leone, but she was put out of business for months when the Ebola crisis shut the border.
Today she is able to return to her spot on the reopened Mano River Bridge linking the countries, desperate to make up for lost income.
"Come and buy your rubber dishes for small money. Come and see the best offers. Small, small money. Anyone can afford it," Kamara cries out to potential customers making the crossing on foot.
Traders were dismayed when the bridge shut for six months at the height of an epidemic which has claimed more than 10,000 lives.
With the border reopened since February, the commercial post of Bo Waterside on the Liberian side is once again open for business, a symbol of hope for the country's desperately-needed economic recovery.
"I sell these dishes to help my parents in sending me to school. My parents are not working... I go to school in the morning and sell in the afternoon," Kamara tells AFP.
"When the border was closed I was afraid that I would not be able to go to school."
Shops in Bo Waterside, a settlement of a few hundred that grew up around the crossing point, sell pasta, rice and local specialties such as popcorn balls.
- Going hungry -
It is difficult to quantify the damage done by the Ebola crisis, as very little data is available on the volume of cross-border trade, most of which is informal.
Locals at the border say countless thousands of Liberian entrepreneurs, unable to sell their goods, lost their sole means of income.
Before the epidemic, Liberia had notched up strong growth of more than nine percent per year since 2005, rising as high as 15.7 percent in 2007, according to World Bank figures.
But authorities fear the crisis will derail the impoverished state's drive to recover from 14 years of civil war, which by the time it ended in 2003 had claimed 250,000 lives.
The economy is forecast to grow by just three percent this year -- less than half the pre-Ebola projection -- equating to a loss in expected income of around $200 million.
The World Bank conducted a series of mobile phone surveys between October and January to assess the damage done by Ebola to Liberian households.
It reported that 41 percent of breadwinners who had been working at the start of the crisis were unemployed, while three-quarters of households admitted to worries over going hungry.
AFP
