Nassal Kebbie: Development of Dignity
Published Tuesday, December 9, 2025
Global Mission Leadership Fall 2025 Newsletter
“I would prefer people call me Nassal,” she explains, although she went by Millicent for her time as a Global Mission Leadership Scholar in 2013 through 2015. For ruling houses in her birth place, Bombali Siaray chiefdom in Sierra Leone, if a woman gives birth to a boy who, as a man, is crowned the Paramount Chief, the woman’s name is changed to Nassal, meaning “Kingmaker.” Nassal Millicent Kebbie (MSW 2015) has not birthed a king, but she sees them everywhere.
In 2007, before Baylor was even a thought, Nassal was working as a Program Manager in Serabu, Bumpe-Ngao chiefdom and noticed that three of the volunteers were exceptionally bright, diligent, and committed to their work[1]. Nassal started chatting with them. “You need to go to college,” she told these young men, “You need to go study and better yourself in the future.” The young men balked. They had no one to help them. “You may not see the people that will help you start, “she explained. “When you start, things will fall into place. You can’t sit and wait for people to tell you, go. You just go. And God provides.” One of the young men applied to college and was accepted but quickly found his living situation untenable. He came to Nassal and said, “You see? This is why I didn’t want to leave.” Nassal did not hesitate. “Come to my home and live there. I have a room.”
As a young person, Nassal was welcomed in by her own shepherd, her first pastor, Reverand Tommy Bangura. When she started attending church, she was always the first to leave. She was living with her uncle, a situation some might envy, but her soul was still uneasy. The service would end, and she would stand, turn, and walk out the doors. Pastor Bangura watched her from the front of the church, week after week, until one Sunday, he approached her before she could leave. “I think he read through me. He saw me. And was just there. He was just always there. He would see you and tap you on the back and just talk.” At first Nassal did not understand. In her culture, an adult does not befriend a child, and besides, what is there to talk about? But he persisted. Nassal and other local church youths and families stayed at his parsonage during the war period. “He used all of the resources he had feeding us on a daily basis until we scattered. He didn’t have much, but what little he had he shared.” Slowly, patiently, Nassal’s pastor became her friend. When she fell into an ambush during the war, her own family couldn’t rescue her. So, Pastor Bangura came, stopping the baptisms, abandoning his family, risking his life to find his one beloved lost sheep, and rejoicing when she was found. “He makes you feel like you are valued,” Nassal shares. “He says, ‘I see you. I understand you. I am here. I am present.’”
This is Nassal’s model of development, an act that is the strategic foundation to all development, dignifying others. She does not start with complex thinking, but rather with dignified relating. As a Child Protection Specialist at UNICEF, her development theory models Bangura. “I believe in development work,” she says. “When people are vulnerable, they don’t talk about their dignity. It’s like they lost it. Because they can go any length and breadth just to survive. For me, the restoration of people is dignity, making them feel valued. That irrespective of where I am or where you are right now, you are a human being, just like me. You are created by God and loved, and you can contribute to your development. For me it is mobilizing people to see who they are, to see the value that they have, to see the resources that God has invested in them, and how they can leverage those resources to turn their lives around. Providing physical resources can come later, but for me it’s about people.”
Growing up in Sierra Leone, Nassal noticed quickly the vulnerability inherent in living as a woman. The communities where she grew up were patriarchal, men controlled the resources, and discrimination was rampant. In polygamous cultures, Nassal shared, fathers only care about the children of the wives they love, leaving many mothers and children to fend for themselves. Nassal herself was a child of polygamy (her father had four wives). “I know the discrimination. I know the abuse violations that are not considered violations.” She wondered how she could contribute to enhancing the well-being of children, how she could stop cycles of abuse both in and out of families.
So Nassal built relationships—with the Sierra Leone Police Family Support Unit, with the Legal Aid Board, and the Ministries of Justice, Social Welfare, and Gender and Children’s Affairs, among others. Through these partnerships, she helps survivors of gender-based violence and other women and children in need of care and protection access justice and services country-wide. For the past seven years, she has worked as a Child Protection Specialist in Child Justice and Legal Identity at UNICEF, acting as Chief of the Makeni Field Office which oversees eight districts and supporting children in acquiring legal identity documents through timely birth registration and birth certificate issuances.
At UNICEF she recently asked her colleagues to tell her about herself. “You always greet people and ask them how they are, how their families are, and ask them generally about life.” Even the drivers noted her coming by every morning, just to ask how they are doing, calling them each by name. “My position doesn't make me anything. It's just a position. It can change anytime. A position is not me. Anybody can be in my position. Before now, there were people in that post. They left. I will also leave, but the humanity remains. We have to be humans first, before anything else.”
[1] It must be noted that today, all three of these young men are university graduates: two serving as health officers and the third as an administrator.