Mahmud Tim Kargbo: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 11 January 2026:
At first reading, Sierra Leone’s 2025 National Budget presents itself as an instrument of compassion. Framed around improving the wellbeing and quality of life of citizens, it adopts the language of inclusion, social protection, food security and human capital development.
It promises relief to households battered by inflation, fragile incomes and persistent deprivation.
Yet, when subjected to rigorous professional scrutiny and assessed against internationally recognised development indices, global financial analysis and institutional evaluations, a more constrained and troubling picture emerges.
This is not merely a question of political intent. It is fundamentally a question of capacity, credibility and consequence.
The budget is unveiled at a time when Sierra Leone remains among the poorest countries in the world by almost every credible global measure. According to the United Nations Development Programme, more than half of the population lives in multidimensional poverty, facing overlapping deprivations in health, education and living standards.
The country continues to rank near the bottom of the Human Development Index, reflecting entrenched structural weaknesses rather than temporary economic disruption.
Against this backdrop, the 2025 Budget proposes expanded social safety nets, agricultural support initiatives and sustained investment in education and health. These priorities echo commitments repeated across successive political cycles and align broadly with the basic needs of a population under acute strain.
However, international economic institutions caution that the fiscal and macroeconomic space required to deliver these promises at scale remains severely limited.
The World Bank projects economic growth of just over four percent. While this suggests a degree of macroeconomic resilience, it remains insufficient to significantly reduce poverty or generate broad based employment in a country with a rapidly expanding population.
More critically, the Bank warns that Sierra Leone’s fiscal position remains fragile. High debt servicing costs, combined with weak domestic revenue mobilisation, continue to crowd out discretionary spending on social services and development priorities.
The International Monetary Fund reinforces this assessment. Although acknowledging recent progress in moderating inflationary pressures, the IMF continues to classify Sierra Leone as being at high risk of debt distress.
Foreign exchange reserves remain thin, exposing the economy to external shocks and constraining the government’s ability to finance sustained and expansive pro poor programmes without heavy reliance on external support.
A closer examination of the budget document reveals several additional constraints. First, the public sector wage bill continues to expand, largely through recruitment in health, education and security services.
While this addresses service delivery gaps, it absorbs a substantial share of domestic revenue, reducing the fiscal space available for transformative investment in infrastructure, agriculture or targeted social protection.
Global financial analysis consistently warns that unchecked wage growth in low-income countries entrench fiscal rigidity and limits the impact of pro poor spending.
Second, the budget emphasises domestic revenue mobilisation, including enhanced tax compliance, digitalisation of collection and reductions in exemptions. Yet much of this revenue derives from indirect taxes, such as consumption levies, which disproportionately affect low-income households.
International studies highlight that reliance on such measures can be regressive, especially when social transfers remain modest in scale.
Third, the budget reiterates commitment to stabilising the energy sector, including subsidies to electricity generation and distribution. While intended to prevent tariff shocks, these subsidies often benefit urban and higher income households disproportionately, further diverting resources from targeted poverty alleviation programmes.
Fourth, capital expenditure remains dominated by externally financed projects, which exposes development spending to donor conditionalities and execution delays. Historical trends show that budget allocations frequently exceed actual disbursement, highlighting the persistent gap between policy ambition and on the ground implementation.
Finally, while the budget acknowledges climate vulnerability, allocations for adaptation and resilience are modest, relative to the scale of risk. Sierra Leone’s exposure to floods, landslides and agricultural disruption underscores that fiscal planning must move beyond short term stabilisation to anticipate systemic shocks.
Within this context, determining whether the 2025 Budget is genuinely pro poor requires a careful distinction between policy design and policy effect. In design, the budget incorporates measures commonly associated with pro poor frameworks, including cash transfer schemes, school feeding programmes and agricultural input subsidies aimed at cushioning vulnerable households.
International development organisations such as Oxfam International and Christian Aid have consistently argued that such interventions are indispensable in low-income economies, where inflation and food price volatility erode purchasing power.
http://www.christianaid.org.uk
Yet, these same organisations caution that social protection measures, when limited in scale and implemented within weak fiscal and administrative systems, risk becoming palliative rather than transformative.
In Sierra Leone’s case, allocations to social protection remain modest, relative to the depth and breadth of poverty. At the same time, debt servicing obligations and recurrent expenditures continue to absorb a significant share of public resources.
Food security provides one of the most rigorous tests of the budget’s pro poor claims. The Global Hunger Index, produced by Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, categorises Sierra Leone among countries experiencing serious levels of hunger.
This classification reflects persistent undernourishment, high child stunting rates and elevated child mortality, signalling that hunger is a chronic structural condition rather than a transient emergency.
http://www.globalhungerindex.org
Analysis by the World Food Programme reinforces this conclusion. Its country level assessments show that a substantial proportion of the population remains food insecure, particularly in rural communities and among the urban poor.
Price volatility, climate related shocks and heavy dependence on food imports continue to undermine household resilience. These factors suggest that agricultural initiatives outlined in the budget face systemic obstacles that extend well beyond the reach of short-term fiscal measures.
The deeper risk, therefore, is that the 2025 Budget prioritises short term stabilisation over long term structural reform. Subsidies, transfers and consumption support may temporarily ease hardship, but without decisive investment in productivity, infrastructure, energy access and private sector development, the economy remains locked in a cycle of low output, limited revenue generation and recurring crisis.
Independent global analysis from The Economist has repeatedly characterised Sierra Leone as an economy where reform ambition is constrained by weak institutions, limited private sector dynamism and chronic infrastructure deficits.
What is notably underemphasised in the official budget narrative is how Sierra Leone’s economic reality is perceived within global financial, governance and risk assessment circles that shape investment flows, aid conditionalities and sovereign credibility.
From the perspective of international financial markets, Bloomberg analysis has consistently highlighted Sierra Leone’s narrow fiscal space, elevated debt exposure and limited capacity to shield citizens from cost-of-living shocks.
Bloomberg’s broader coverage of low-income economies under inflationary stress underscores a central dilemma confronting the budget. Governments with weak revenue bases and heavy external obligations are often compelled to adopt austerity adjacent fiscal frameworks that privilege macroeconomic stability over expansive social investment. In such settings, pro poor rhetoric collides with fiscal arithmetic.
This tension is also evident in global competitiveness assessments. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth frameworks repeatedly identify Sierra Leone as constrained by weak institutions, limited infrastructure, low productivity and fragile human capital foundations.
These constraints are cumulative and structural. They cannot be reversed through annual budget reallocations alone, particularly when development spending is compressed by debt servicing and emergency stabilisation requirements.
From the standpoint of development partners, the European Union has consistently framed Sierra Leone’s economic challenge in terms of resilience rather than rapid expansion.
EU programming documents emphasise governance reform, fiscal discipline, social cohesion and climate resilience, implicitly acknowledging that public finance in Sierra Leone remains largely defensive in orientation.
Under such conditions, national budgets are designed to prevent deterioration rather than accelerate prosperity.
This international framing raises difficult questions about the depth of transformation the 2025 Budget can realistically deliver. When fiscal policy is primarily calibrated to meet macroeconomic benchmarks set by creditors and development partners, including IMF programme conditionalities, the scope for ambitious and redistributive pro poor intervention is inherently limited.
Concerns surrounding governance and accountability further complicate the picture. While the Consortium of International Investigative Journalists does not analyse national budgets directly, its global investigations into illicit financial flows, public finance opacity and resource leakage demonstrate how low-income countries routinely lose critical revenue through weak oversight and corruption.
These findings are directly relevant to Sierra Leone’s fiscal context, where constrained domestic revenue mobilisation coexists with persistent expenditure pressures.
Such investigative insights underscore a central weakness not fully addressed by the 2025 Budget. Without stronger accountability mechanisms, institutional credibility and enforcement capacity, increased allocations alone do not guarantee improved outcomes for the poor.
Pro poor budgets are judged not only by headline commitments, but by whether resources reach intended beneficiaries efficiently and transparently.
From a policy and governance perspective, Chatham House has warned that fiscal consolidation in fragile states carries substantial social risks if poorly sequenced.
Budgets that prioritise stabilisation, debt management and revenue extraction in the absence of inclusive growth and job creation may inadvertently deepen hardship, particularly in contexts of rapid population growth.
At the multilateral level, both the African Union and the United Nations stress that inclusive growth in West Africa requires sustained investment in agriculture, education, health systems and climate resilience, underpinned by stronger institutions and public accountability.
Short term fiscal fixes, while sometimes unavoidable, are not substitutes for long term structural transformation.
Taken together, these international assessments converge on a consistent conclusion. Sierra Leone’s economic challenge is not primarily one of policy intent, but of structural limitation.
The country operates within a narrow corridor shaped by debt burdens, weak productivity, fragile institutions and high exposure to external shocks.
Within that reality, the 2025 Budget is best understood as a document of economic triage. It seeks to stabilise, to cushion and to endure. It mitigates suffering without fundamentally altering its underlying causes. This does not render the budget insignificant, but it places its ambitions firmly in perspective.
For millions of Sierra Leoneans living at the margins of subsistence, the budget may offer temporary relief, but it provides limited assurance of durable transformation. From a global analytical standpoint, the verdict is unambiguous.
Until growth becomes more inclusive, fiscal space more resilient and structural weaknesses more decisively addressed, no budget, however well intentioned, can fully meet the standards of a genuinely pro poor economic programme.
Until then, the distance between pro poor promise and pro poor reality remains not rhetorical, but structural.