Ask most people in the UK what they associate with the small west African nation of Sierra Leone, and it’s likely it will be one of three things: blood diamonds, Ebola, or the country’s civil war, which killed an estimated 50,000 people between 1991 and 2002. It’s a set of associations that is understandably frustrating for the country’s leaders.
“I was just at the UN, of all places, and when you meet someone and say, ‘I am from Sierra Leone’, they go, ‘oh yes blood diamonds’. This was not in 2000 or even 2010, this was last week,” says David Sengeh, chief minister of Sierra Leone, which is a position equivalent to prime minister. “These stories are stuck in people’s minds until you are able to replace them with a new one.”
A former research scientist at IBM with a PhD from MIT, and - until recently - long, dreadlocked hair, the 39-year-old Sengeh is not your typical world leader. He met The Independent at a summit held in London this month to drum up investment in his country, which this year has a GDP per capita of just $980 (£730), according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Given how risk-averse investors are, it’s safe to say that the global financial system is not currently working in the country’s favour. Sengeh shares an anecdote of an investor asking one of the main global credit ratings agencies what their score was for Sierra Leone, only for the agency to find that they did not even have a profile for the country on their system.
Cuts to overseas aid announced this year have also hit Sierra Leone hard, leaving the government scrambling to fill gaps, particularly in healthcare. The UK has traditionally been the largest bilateral donor to Sierra Leone, and the country is already feeling the effects of Britain reducing its aid budget from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent of Gross National Income, especially in healthcare and education for girls, says Sengeh. The cuts sought by Donald Trump in the US have also had an impact.
But the chief minister does not want to dwell on the negative: he was in London to make the case that the country is open for business, arguing that the time is right for foreign investment to replace foreign aid as the main flow of capital into the country.
“Sierra Leone is ready for investment and open for partnerships: And that’s not a slogan but a statement of intent, backed by real numbers and stories,” he says. “We have to transition from aid to investment.”
The case for this transition is clear: In the years since its civil war, Sierra Leone has worked hard to establish a reputation for relative stability and good governance. The country has held regular multiparty elections, while recently updating the year against which the country’s GDP is calculated - called rebasing, and allowing the use of more recent prices - has helped bring the country’s national debt to more manageable levels. The government is also in the midst of a land reform programme, formalising and digitising land records, while post-Covid inflation has now been brought down from 50 per cent to 5 per cent.
Growth this year is projected to reach a healthy - though not extraordinary - 4.4 per cent. But according to British International Investments (BII), the Foreign Office-backed British development finance institution that co-hosted the London Sierra Leone Summit, the conditions are now ripe for foreign investors to come in and drive the economy to new heights.
“It’s a beautiful country, it’s an economy on the rise, it has a bright population, and it has a vibrant private sector, led by bold and tenacious entrepreneurs,” says Chris Chijutomi, head of the Africa programme at BII, who also praised the country’s government for “streamlining regulation and enhancing transparency.”
President Julius Maada Bio, a progressive who survived an attempted coup in 2022, has set a target for the country to be classified as “middle income” by 2039. Key policies to drive this include spending a fifth of the national budget on education, and introducing a $50 million (£37.3m) National Agriculture Plan - “because there's no country that has ever developed without building this human capacity and feeding itself,” explains Sengeh.
BII, whose remit is to invest UK public money in developing countries, is a top investor in the country, injecting £100m since 2009. Recent deals in the country include money towards a 50 Megawatt solar plant that is set to increase the country’s power supply by 30 per cent, and $15m (£11.2m) for Miro, a sustainable timber processing company.
Numerous other Sierra Leonean companies across the agricultural, mineral, and manufacturing sectors pitched to investors at the London summit. Sierra Leone is also building its first wind farm, in a project backed by Octopus Energy and Hollywood actor Idris Elba, whose father was Sierra Leonean. Currently just five per cent of the country’s rural population has access to electricity.
Sengeh acknowledges that aid cuts are having a big impact. “There are still massive gaps in our health budget, with money towards essential medicines missing particularly in rural areas,” he says. The world’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals - which are UN-backed targets from 2015 that include “No poverty”, “Zero hunger”, and “Clean water and sanitation” - look further away than ever, he adds.
But rather than mourning funding that has been lost, Sengeh believes the focus should be looking now at new kinds of investment that can help make the country resilient. “Governments across Africa are realising that now is the time to actually wake up and think how we can become self-sufficient,” Sengeh says. “We need to be thinking of sectors, such as infrastructure, where the private sector can play a bigger role."
The good news for governments is that many African countries are slowly but surely becoming more attractive for private investors. Speaking at an event held last week by the African Private Capital Association (AVCA), Phillipp Hein, the head of global climate investments at DEG, the German government-backed development finance institute, told The Independent that the volatility seen in the post-pandemic years has now calmed, and we appear to now be in “quite a stable phase in terms of macroeconomic risk”.
Hein warned, though, that aid cuts could begin to have an impact on that stability in the months ahead as financial pressures take hold. “If some of these governments depended heavily on aid to balance their budgets, and they then run into budget problems, this could have really negative impacts on the investor environment,” he said. “We are monitoring this very closely.”
Climate crunch point
With extreme weather becoming more pronounced and limited money available to respond, another key risk faced by Sierra Leone comes in the form of the climate crisis, with the country regularly ranked among the top 10 most climate vulnerable in the world. “Early rains, late rains, no rains, we are seeing them all,” says Sengeh.
Adapting to new climate realities is an area that countries will struggle to achieve without aid. “A capitalist investor wants to break even in year seven and then earn 15 or 20 per cent return,” explains Sengeh, but protecting communities with climate-resilient agriculture or strengthening biodiversity by protecting mangroves is an altogether different proposition.
Countries across the region report that they are struggling to face up to the climate adaptation challenge given the paltry level of international adaptation finance that is available.
Sierra Leone also faces difficult decisions around whether to exploit its natural assets in pursuit of development. The country’s forests lie on considerable mineral deposits - and Sengeh believes it is ultimately up to how wealthy nations decide to act when it comes things like financing to adapt to the climate crisis.
“Do you use the mineral assets as insurance and receive climate financing from wealthy countries to protect the forests, or do you cut the forests and get the minerals that you need for your country's development,” he says. “These are tough questions that we need to face, which developing countries 50 years ago did not.”
A key moment for discussions is to come at the annual UN climate conference, COP30, which is taking place in Brazil in November. Climate diplomacy has taken a body blow this year with Trump’s decision to remove the US from the Paris Agreement - but Sengeh says that he wants Sierra Leone to stick to the climate track regardless of what happens elsewhere in the world.
“Countries like Sierra Leone, which have visionary leadership, understand that we need to protect the environment not because of what other countries are doing,” he says. “We're doing it for ourselves and our children. “
This article was produced as part of The Independent’s Rethinking Global Aid project
