Ogoo Farm in Sierra Leone’s Waterloo District is about to bring in its October rice crop. The farmer is optimistic that it will be a record yield. Increasing agricultural productivity is one of the 146 priority initiatives included in the country’s economic recovery plan, also known as the president’s recovery priorities. If all goes well, many farmers will double their production this year.
The country spends more than $110m (£89m) annually on importing rice. In 2014, this represented 4.8% of the country’s imports, second to refined petroleum. While Sierra Leone is still a long way from being self-sufficient in its staple food, initiatives such as providing farmers with improved seed rice and fertiliser are part of an extensive plan to jump-start Sierra Leone’s agricultural sector.
When President Koroma launched this 24-month economic recovery plan to address the catastrophic effects of the Ebola epidemic and commodities price crash in Sierra Leone, he was unequivocal about its demands, stating that it would require “a new way of working”, collaboration, sacrifice and unity.
Mindful of the lessons of the Ebola response, which reasserted the need for Sierra Leone’s sovereignty in its own development, the country’s economic recovery plan is led by Sierra Leoneans. Aligning their support behind it, donors have signalled their approval for the approach, and as the largest single donor, with £240m, the Department for International Development (DfID) has a substantial stake in its success.
After a nine-month focus on health, education, income and private sector support, the scope widened to include increasing access to water and energy, and boosting public sector efficiency for the remaining 15 months.
The breadth of the plan reflects the scale of need in Sierra Leone. The economy contracted by 22% in 2015. Electricity reaches less than 10% of the population and only about 5% have access to piped water. Maternal and child health, which had been slowly improving thanks to a free healthcare programme for mothers and children, deteriorated during and after the epidemic. With as many as 100 children in a classroom, educational standards are poor and more than 60% of the population is illiterate or semi-literate [pdf].
The early months of the programme were taken up with necessary background preparations, such as an intensive planning process, which created the framework to allow recovery activities in all the country’s 149 chiefdoms to be tracked weekly. During this period, managing the nation’s expectations of an immediate improvement in circumstances was a challenge. Introducing community engagement officers to all 14 districts to keep dialogue going and exchange information has helped, and as visible signs of improvement begin to emerge, public confidence in the process is growing.
A school construction programme is under way to reduce class sizes by delivering 225 new classrooms across the country. It feeds into a bigger impetus to improve educational outcomes, as does a national school feeding programme, which will give the 1.2 million children in government and government-assisted schools a cooked meal two days a week. A significant contributor to the severity of the Ebola outbreak was the chronic shortage of water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in schools, clinics and communities more generally. The 19 boreholes that have been sunk in Kambia, Sierra Leone’s northernmost province, are the first of 125 that will provide safe water to communities with urgent needs.
These are part of a wider scheme to supply water to 700,000 people in the provinces and 600,000 in the capital, Freetown, which started with a nationwide water-point mapping survey to identify what is available and where. The recovery plan has expanded to accommodate a dry season scheme for providing water in Freetown.
The delivery team works on identifying and resolving issues as they arise so that they don’t derail the recovery. Weekly meetings between all the government departments and either the chief of staff or the president track progress, identify blockages and design solutions. For example, when it became clear that a skills gap was impeding planning and reporting, the delivery team introduced a capability-building programme, which is being rolled out.
The most challenging issue has been funding – both the disbursement of funds from donors and the government of Sierra Leone’s own finances, with a recent press notice detailing the austerity measures the government was introducing in response to the severity of its economic situation.
Overall, however, the process remains on track. The Ebola epidemic galvanised Sierra Leoneans to performance manage the salvation of their country. Ebola, like nothing in the country’s history, exposed the consequences of a failure to deliver, and the president’s recovery priorities could leave a model for successful service delivery in Sierra Leone – one that actually meets customers’ needs.
Memuna Forna is communications specialist with the delivery team for the president’s recovery priorities in Sierra Leone
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