Landerapport på engelsk: Sierra Leone

Kilde: Ulandssekretariatet

Political situation
Sierra Leone became independent of British colonial rule in 1961. The Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) was the first ruling party. In 1971 Sierra Leone became a Republic. The first President in the new republic was Siaka Stevens from the APC (All Peoples Congress). In 1978 Sierra Leone became a one-party state under Steven’s APC party. In 1992, the APC was overthrown in the wake of a brutal rebel war which started in Liberia in 1989, spilled over to Sierra Leone, and transformed into a civil war that continued for 11 years. The former President, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, was first elected following multi-party elections in 1996; and in 2002 he won a second final five-year term re-election. Presidential and parliamentary elections were held in August 2007 and won by the APC with Ernest Bai Koromo as President. Local council elections took place in July 2008.
Since independence, the SLPP has ruled Sierra Leone for 16 years (1961-1967 and from 1996 to 2007). The APC has ruled for 28 years from 1967 to 1992 and from 2007. Various military regimes ruled the remainder 12 years period.
The scars and effects of the brutal civil war in the 90s are still very much apparent in the country. Sierra Leone was devastated, infrastructure destroyed, the social sectors crushed, and almost half of the population had fled. It has been a major task since the end of the conflict to try to secure peace and reconciliation and to try to rebuild the country. Another important task has been to reintegrate the former rebel soldiers into society.
Massive international support has been coming to Sierra Leone, but there is still a very long way and the challenges of reconstruction still face the country. Infrastructure is still very poor. 

Social situation – and security
The situation in the capital Freetown is extremely difficult. Some 2 million people live in the city where almost no houses have water or electricity. Most of the people do not have a formal job and many live under extremely difficult conditions. Almost one million people came to Freetown during the war. There are now plans to try to relocate people to the rural areas or other towns in the regions. It is, however, a most difficult task because it does require facilities and jobs in order to convince people to move.
The present social security scheme in Sierra Leone only covers death, invalidity and pensions. Both employers and employees are contributing to the scheme. Thus, new forms of payment and new forms of coverage which could be more relevant for informal economy workers will have to be found. Within the framework of our pilot project the SLLC (Sierra Leone Labour Congress) has now embarked on discussions with the government and the National Social Security Institution, NASSIT, on how social security coverage could be secured for people in the informal economy.
The social security scheme in Sierra Leone is open to informal economy members, but so far very few have adhered to the system. Research has been carried out to find out why so few informal economy workers have joined the scheme and what needs to be changed to make it more interesting for them. Technicians from NASSIT have in this connection been to Ghana to look at the existing schemes there. A pilot project will now be initiated in cooperation with the ILO in which a special scheme for the informal economy has been designed which could function as a savings account/collateral for loans. It is based on the idea from Ghana, but they want to adapt it to the situation in Sierra Leone. The basic principle will be that people have to declare their income and pay 15% of income for the scheme. NASSIT has also created a special department for the informal economy. 
The NASSIT Act is presently being revised and it is expected that the new Act could be adopted in 2010.

Within NASSIT a new national health care scheme is also being discussed. It will probably be like an insurance scheme, but there would be two categories of members – those who contribute and those who don’t (defined by the communities as very vulnerable groups). For informal economy workers they would probably have to pay 10,000 Leones per year (some 3 USD) which would also cover their dependants. Various sources of funding would be used to cover the scheme like VAT and mobile phone tax. It is so far envisaged that the scheme should cover all sickness under primary and secondary health care including preventive care. It would cover state, private and missionary hospitals and clinics.
However, it should be stressed that there are huge challenges to make such a scheme work. The conditions of the state hospitals are very poor and there is a lack of personnel and facilities. There are presently 69 doctors in the whole country! So it will take years to train the necessary doctors and nurses, and to get the necessary infrastructure.  
The low income earning capacity of this group of workers particularly women, have forced most of them to come up with various forms of mutual aid groups as coping strategies against the shocks and risks they often encounter in their communities. The pattern and ability of saving among the informal sector workers is generally low and is conducted largely through informal channels such as “osusu” (rotating savings scheme), “by-day” (daily savings scheme), etc. Net saving is negative across this sector due largely to low income earnings.  As a result of the lack of formalized social protection systems for workers in this sector, the traditional pattern of saving is mostly based on common understanding and mutual arrangements among these workers as a coping strategy. 

Youth employment
An occupational distribution of labour force (15-64 years) by sex depicted that about 88.3% of the total labour force was in low skilled occupation, comprising of service workers and shop and market sales workers, skilled agriculture and fishing workers and elementary occupation. In terms of sex, there were more women (93.7%) than men (83.0%) who were engaged in this occupation. This also manifested the fact that the nature of the Sierra Leone economy is mainly agrarian with a low level of industrial production.
The labour market is characterised by massive unemployment particularly among the youth who constitute over half the population of Sierra Leone. The unemployment situation is attributed to the socio-economic situation in the country after the civil war.
The main obstacles to youth employment creation relate to the very limited job market linked to the sluggish growth in the private sector. Access to appropriate technology, societal attitude with regards to giving greater preference to imported goods, poor investment culture, lack of youth awareness of business opportunities, limited access to finance, youth employability (the majority lack the requisite qualification to engage in paid employment), and poor institutional programming and coordination. Addressing these problems would go a long way in fighting youth unemployment in Sierra Leone.