By Mahmud Tim Kargbo
Saturday, 1 August 2026
Sierra Leone has never lacked people willing to work. What it has lacked is an institutional system capable of making that work progressively safer, more productive and more rewarding. Long before the formal economy records a new vacancy, domestic workers are caring for households, traders are moving goods, riders are connecting communities, store labourers are keeping commerce supplied and creative workers are turning talent into income. The International Labour Organisation, http//: www.ilo.org, recorded from 2018 data that 89.9 per cent of jobs in Sierra Leone were informal and that the informal economy accounted for about 60 per cent of GDP. Those figures are not a current census, but they expose a structural truth that remains difficult to escape: the majority of Sierra Leoneans have been working inside an economy that public policy has too often treated as peripheral.
That is why the recent stakeholder dialogue convened under the leadership of Chief Minister Dr David Moinina Sengeh deserves more than passing attention. One stakeholder described the gathering as unusual precisely because it brought together Government, organised labour, employers and a wide range of informal sector institutions in one conversation about work, protection and livelihoods. The significance lies not simply in who attended, but in the decision to bring a neglected part of the economy into the centre of government discussion. The Office of the Chief Minister, http//: www.statehouse.gov.sl, is mandated to strengthen cross government coordination, reduce policy fragmentation and drive the implementation of priority initiatives. In that context, the Chief Minister’s intervention can be understood as an exercise in institutional coordination: taking a sector scattered across ministries, unions, associations and occupations and making it visible as one national economic question.
That leadership matters because the informal economy is rarely governed by one institution. A domestic worker touches labour policy and social protection; a commercial rider touches transport regulation, insurance and road safety; a trader depends upon markets, finance, infrastructure and local administration; a creative entrepreneur requires investment, digital access, intellectual property protection and skills. When these issues are treated separately, workers experience the consequences as separate burdens even though they arise from the same economic condition. Bringing the institutions together therefore does more than improve dialogue. It creates the possibility of seeing the worker as a whole person whose livelihood crosses administrative boundaries. Good coordination begins when government stops organising the citizen according to the structure of ministries and starts organising policy around the realities of the citizen.
The need for that shift is made clearer by Sierra Leone’s employment arithmetic. The World Bank, http//: www.worldbank.org, reported in June 2026 that the country generates about 41,000 jobs annually while requiring roughly 75,000 new jobs each year through 2050 merely to maintain its existing employment to population ratio. No serious government can close that gap through public sector recruitment, and no responsible employment strategy can pretend that all forms of work offer the same economic future. The more important task is to raise the productivity and security of the work that already exists while creating new opportunities around it. The World Bank’s approval of $40 million for agricultural value chain development is instructive because it connects jobs to finance, markets, processing, productivity and private investment. The lesson extends beyond agriculture: Sierra Leone needs an economy in which work becomes a platform for advancement rather than simply a mechanism for surviving another month.
This is also why the language of informality needs to change. Workers do not enter domestic service, petty trading, transport or small enterprise because they have collectively chosen exclusion from modern economic life. They work where demand exists and where entry is possible, often with little capital and few alternatives. The ILO’s Opportunity Salone programme, http//: www.ilo.org, has consequently focused on productivity, skills, infrastructure, finance, market access and value chains rather than treating registration as the sole answer. Formalisation becomes meaningful when it gives an enterprise something it could not obtain informally. If formal status produces access to finance, insurance, training, markets and enforceable rights, it becomes economically rational. If it produces only forms and fees, the state should not be surprised when citizens remain unconvinced.
The constitutional principle is stronger still. The Constitution of Sierra Leone, http//: www.parliament.gov.sl, directs state policy towards adequate means of livelihood and suitable employment and calls for fair, just and humane working conditions, including protection of workers’ health, safety and welfare. Those principles cannot logically apply only to citizens fortunate enough to possess conventional employment contracts. A domestic worker contributes to the productive capacity of the household, a rider keeps people connected to workplaces and markets, a trader sustains circulation of goods, and a store labourer helps commerce function. The institutional form of their work may differ, but its economic importance does not. The state’s responsibility should therefore be measured by whether its institutions help citizens convert labour into security, productivity and greater economic choice.
Social protection is where that promise must become tangible. NASSIT, http//: www.nassit.org.sl, already provides avenues through which self employed people and workers in domestic service can participate in national social insurance, demonstrating that the institutional framework is capable of reaching beyond the traditional employer employee relationship. Yet the existence of a scheme is not the same as effective coverage. Informal workers frequently have irregular incomes, making contributions more difficult to sustain than for salaried employees whose payments are automatically deducted. The ILO’s Sierra Leone Decent Work Country Programme has recognised this challenge and identified the possibility of designing a special social protection arrangement for informal economy workers. The policy question is therefore no longer whether informal workers deserve protection. It is whether the architecture of protection has been designed around the economic lives they actually lead.
The concerns raised by commercial riders and drivers reveal the cost of getting that architecture wrong. One accident can remove a worker’s earning capacity while leaving medical bills, family responsibilities and other expenses intact. Questions about insurance, licensing, road safety and public education consequently belong to one institutional conversation about risk. Regulation must protect passengers and other road users, but enforcement alone cannot constitute decent work. A stronger system would combine compliance with realistic access to insurance, safety education and mechanisms that reduce the economic shock of injury. The objective should be a transport sector in which safer behaviour and worker protection reinforce one another rather than being treated as competing interests.
Skills provide another route from recognition to economic mobility. A domestic worker can possess years of experience in childcare, caregiving, cooking and household management without having credentials that make those abilities visible to another employer. Properly designed skills assessment and certification could convert accumulated experience into recognised economic value. The same principle applies to trades and services across the informal economy where practical competence often exceeds formal qualification. The purpose of certification should therefore not be to create another bureaucratic category, but to give workers portable evidence of what they can do. Once competence becomes visible, it can become more easily rewarded through better employment, higher productivity and greater professional mobility.
The creative economy demonstrates what becomes possible when the institutions around workers begin to function differently. The World Bank’s Creative Economy Diagnostic, http//: www.worldbank.org, estimates that Sierra Leone’s creative industries contribute about 4.5 per cent of GDP and more than 10 per cent of formal employment, while identifying constraints in finance, infrastructure, intellectual property, digital systems and market access. Its CreatiFi programme has shown that practical interventions can produce commercial effects, including formalisation, new market relationships and direct job creation. That experience offers a broader lesson for policymakers: an informal worker is not necessarily an informal destiny. Give a capable person access to capital, skills, markets and appropriate institutions and the same individual who once appeared in policy as a beneficiary can become an employer, investor or exporter.
The deeper test of the Chief Minister’s intervention, therefore, will be whether the dialogue becomes an institutional habit rather than a memorable meeting. His office is specifically designed to coordinate ministries, monitor implementation and strengthen delivery across government, making it well placed to ensure that recommendations do not disappear into the boundaries between agencies. That leadership opportunity is significant because the informal economy has suffered partly from fragmentation: labour policy sits in one place, transport regulation in another, social protection elsewhere, while workers experience all of them simultaneously. A coordinated response could establish measurable priorities for skills certification, social protection, occupational safety, access to finance, public communication and sector development. The achievement would not simply be that Government listened to workers. It would be that Government learned to govern the economy through the realities those workers described.
The dialogue should therefore be remembered not for the number of institutions around the table, but for whether it changes what happens after the table is cleared.
Sierra Leone’s working majority has already demonstrated its capacity to build livelihoods without waiting for perfect institutions. It has kept households functioning, markets supplied, passengers moving and enterprises alive through periods when formal opportunity was scarce. What government now owes that majority is not another celebration of resilience, but a system that makes such resilience less necessary. The significance of Dr David Moinina Sengeh’s convening role will ultimately be measured by whether a sector that was too often dispersed across policy silos becomes a permanent object of coordinated national economic strategy. Sierra Leone does not need to teach its people how to work; they have already done that. It needs institutions capable of ensuring that the work of the majority finally becomes a foundation for security, productivity and prosperity.