In 2011, Sirleaf was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her nonviolent efforts to promote peace in Liberia and her struggle for women’s rights. She spent her first term as president working to maintain unity and stability after more than a decade of civil war, and she helped bring women into the peacekeeping process through the example of her own political activism and her encouragement of women’s groups working in support of democracy. As Harvard’s 2011 Commencement speaker, Sirleaf said, “It was the Liberian women who fought the final battle for peace, who came … to demonstrate for the end to our civil war.”

Her legacy as president also includes strengthening women’s position in society. She started Liberian programs to educate and empower girls, improve working conditions for market women, and increase gender equity in leadership.

As a continuation of this work, in 2018 Sirleaf founded the EJS Center to advance women’s public leadership and social development in Africa through programming, advocacy, research, and exhibitions. For the last five years, the center has served as a home for Sirleaf’s personal and professional archives.

Last year, Sirleaf and staff at the center began to discuss additional possibilities for her personal materials.

“We looked to Harvard because I have a long relationship with Harvard, and it is a premier higher education institution,” Sirleaf said. “Having my papers there will mean they are much more available around the world.”

Oley Dibba-Wadda, the EJS Center executive director and liaison to the board, added, “We are reassured that stewardship of these papers could not be handed over to a better institution that would ensure greater access to a wider audience.”

The archives coming to Harvard document Sirleaf’s life and career in finance and politics from the 1960s through the 2010s. They include materials related to her political and social activism; the Liberian peace process and peace talks; speeches and public addresses; records of her presidential campaigns and her work with international development organizations; and personal letters and emails.

Harvard University Archivist Virginia Hunt said the materials are “vibrant primary source documents that share the story of both a groundbreaking political figure and a strong, determined woman.”

“President Sirleaf’s personal and professional archives tell her story firsthand,” Hunt said. “Hosting these materials at Harvard will open up the possibility for so many people to connect with, be inspired by, and learn from her journey.”

In preparing for Sirleaf’s archives to come to Harvard University Archives, Hunt has been working closely with EJS Center archives staff Lucia Massalee-Yallah and Jenelle Sirleaf to assess the scope and contents of the materials. Their work thus far, Hunt said, has been invaluable.

Hunt and her colleagues will continue working with EJS Center archivists to ship the records to Cambridge this summer and plan to travel to Liberia later in the year to do additional work together.

An Ellen Johnson Sirleaf papers archivist will be appointed at Harvard to lead the processing of Sirleaf’s personal archives over the next two years. In 2025, Harvard Library will open the archives for research and make digital versions of portions of the archives publicly available online.

“Once the papers are open at Harvard, we expect them to be used in many disciplines,” Hunt said. “Political scientists, scholars in international relations and gender studies, historians of Africa, and more. We hope to maximize their scholarship across the world.”