This country profile was published in November 2009 in our annual 'Africa in 2010' issue. The next edition, 'Africa in 2011' will be on sale in November 2010.

Country Profile

Top Sierra Leonean Companies

Top Sierra Leonean Banks

President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People’s Congress (APC), mindful of an upcoming election in mid-2012 and keen to win a second term, will try to impress the electorate in 2010. Several factors, a long time coming, may come to fruition in the lead-up to the polls. The most important is the Bumbuna hydro-electric dam, which was finally switched on late in 2009, only 30 years late. Providing 50MW of power, with potential to one day increase to 300MW, it will mean that Freetown and other towns on the way to it, such as the northern capital of Makeni, will be electrified from a newly fitted national grid. Local industry is likely to benefit, but it is still only a fraction of the total potential hydro-power potential, estimated at 1,200MW.


The Anti-Corruption Commission, headed by 
Abdul Tejan-Cole, is likely to go after some big fish in the political and private sectors, as well as continuing to make regular ministry inspections in search of ghost workers. The country has also moved up 20 places in the World Bank’s Doing Business survey in the last three years, and Koroma has signed his ministers – whom he reshuffled at the start of the 2009 – up to delivery targets for the first time. The APC will continue to work with smaller parties in the legislature because it is just shy of a majority and the tempers which led to violent clashes at the headquarters of the opposition Sierra Leone People’s Party in March have calmed. 


In a spur for national pride and an important international signal, the country once home to the world’s largest peacekeeping force during the 1991-2002 civil war will now send a company of reconnaissance soldiers to undertake peacekeeping duties with the joint UN/AU mission in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Economic growth has slowed considerably in the donor-dependent country, in line with the impact of the global downturn across the continent, to a projected 4% in 2009, down from 5.5% in 2008, but that is still double what the IMF is forecasting for 
Africa as a whole. Koroma is proud to have weathered global recession and the oil and food price hikes, and hopes that the Sierra Leone that would have descended into crisis due to such external shocks is now forgotten. The country has also finally come off the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index, although it will still be third from bottom in 2010, based on data from 2007.


Sierra Leone is no doubt playing catch up. Both remittances and mineral exports – namely of diamonds and titanium ore – have fallen by more than 30%, and the country has faced a foreign currency crisis, with the leone losing one-third of its value against the US dollar. Festering corruption, unemployment among volatile young men and donor-dependency remain the trickier problems for the government to tackle. 


Despite commercially viable oil finds off the coast by a consortium of oil companies made up of Anadarko, Tullow, Repsol and Woodside in 2009, oil production and associated revenues must wait for several years. More exploration will be conducted in 2010 to determine the extent of the reserves in Sierra Leone’s territorial waters.


The greatest hope and scope for growth remains in agriculture, given that only 11% of the country’s 5.4m hectares of land is cultivated, but it remains to be seen whether the country can attract sufficient investment to develop its potential to produce rice and oil palm. Production of rice, the nation’s staple, is up 35%, reducing the costly reliance on imports.
Agriculture has already caught the eye of investor George Soros who has met with President 
Koroma and whose Soros Economic Development Fund has set up in the country, while several other smaller private equity investors are eyeing 
opportunities, including in fisheries. 

Sierra Leone's Top Companies

No companies from Sierra Leone featured in The Africa's Report's Top 500 Companies in Africa 2009. 

Sierra Leone's Top Banks

No banks from Sierra Leone featured in The Africa's Report's Top Banks in Africa 2009.