There is something almost wilfully blind about how international peacebuilding has approached women in post-war Sierra Leone. Decade after decade, billions of dollars have flowed into national institutions, formal justice systems, and centralised governance, while the women who actually rebuild social life at the community level have been documented, if at all, primarily as victims. Not as governance actors. Not as peacebuilders. As victims. This article takes that framing apart. Drawing substantially on the peacebuilding scholarship of Ndifon Neji Obi, alongside Sierra Leonean governance data and community-level peacebuilding assessments, we examine how women exercise real governance authority through decentralised structures that international frameworks have persistently undervalued and underfunded. The evidence is striking. Women constitute 87.3 percent of membership in the most active peacebuilding tier, community-based women’s associations, compared with 14.2 percent in chiefdom councils. Women-led initiatives achieve sustainability ratings of 4.0 out of 5; externally-managed donor programmes average 2.3. Yet decentralised governance receives around 8 percent of peacebuilding financing, against 47 percent absorbed by national institutions. Obi’s concept of the ‘recognition gap’, the systematic invisibility of women’s relational peace work within formal policy architecture, organises our analysis throughout. The argument we advance is straightforward: durable peace in Sierra Leone will not be achieved by continuing to pour resources into centralised structures that demonstrably underperform, while ignoring the community-level governance infrastructure that women have built and sustained.