Liberia, a resource-rich West African country of about 3.3 million people, is struggling to recover from a civil war that left around 250,000 dead and forced more than half the population from their homes.

• Conflict fuelled by diamonds and timber
• Widespread rape
• Africa's first woman president

The vast majority of Liberians live below the poverty line, and the 14-year conflict destroyed the country's infrastructure. The capital Monrovia turned on street lights in some zones in 2006 after 15 years without electricity.

Getting Liberia back on its feet will require more than laying sewage pipes and setting up power grids. It means dealing with about 100,000 former fighters, many of them children, and either holding them accountable for thousands of deaths, rapes, robberies and mutilations, or reintegrating them into shattered communities.

Liberia was ranked as the ninth weakest country in the world in the Brooking Institute's 2008 survey of fragile states.

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first female head of state, was voted into power in November 2005 on an anti-corruption platform, and has a tough job. Whether and how to punish warlord and former president Charles Taylor divides opinion and threatens the country's fragile peace, despite the deployment of nearly 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers.

Liberia has been intimately entwined with violence and unrest in its neighbours, and analysts say the region is still volatile enough for wars to start up again. The United Nations has eased a ban on weapons sales to Liberia so that newly trained police and security forces can be armed, and lifted embargos on exports of timber and diamonds which helped to fuel the conflict.

Life expectancy (2004)	42 years (U.N. Development Report 2006)
Women and girls raped during civil war (2006)	40 percent (Estimate by U.N. Mission in Liberia - UNMIL)
Number of ex-combatants demobilised at end of conflict (2005)	More than 100,000 (U.N. Mission in Liberia - UNMIL)
Child soldiers demobilised (2004 estimate)	21,000 (Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers)
Refugees still in neighbouring countries (March 2007)	105,034 (UNHCR)
Children who die under age of five (2005)	235 per 1,000 (UNICEF), 2007