Mariama Jalloh grasped the full extent of the crisis facing Sierra Leone in October 2022, when a woman came to speak to her in her organization’s offices in the northern Koinadugu district. Jalloh, a 30-year-old mother of two, is the head of Forward Women with Disability, an organization that advocates for women with a variety of conditions – blindness, leprosy, epilepsy, polio, amputations. It also provides literacy and basic business training, and employs about 25 women, making soap and processing cloth.
‘My children and I didn’t eat yesterday,’ the woman said. ‘We couldn’t afford it.’ Jalloh suggested the woman asked at her local shop to get some rice – Sierra Leone’s staple food – on credit. But she had already tried that, and the shop owner refused because she was also struggling as sales were dropping. Soon, other women came to Jalloh with similar stories.
It was one of the signs of the vertiginous crisis plaguing the West African nation. Inflation rose to 28 per cent in August 2022, according to the latest available data. The UN has identified Sierra Leone as one of 60 countries struggling to afford food imports, and the price of most food items more than doubled in the last year. Take rice – a 50kg bag used to cost 200,000 leones ($11.30 at current exchange rates) before the pandemic – as of November it had reached 550,000 leones ($31.15), which is close to the country’s monthly minimum wage, 600,000 leones ($34). Sierra Leone’s currency has depreciated heavily, losing value against the dollar, making imports more expensive and worsening the crisis.
‘The minimum wage is not even enough to get you a bag of rice!’ says Amjata Bayoh, a 30-year-old freelance community journalist in the capital, Freetown. He says inflation has always been part of Sierra Leoneans’ reality. ‘But it just keeps getting worse, that’s the worrying part.’
‘Although the crisis affects everybody, I try to concentrate on disability because I see us as more vulnerable. If the other people suffer, what about us?’
Many in Freetown, including him, stopped buying from local shops, opting for a trip to wholesalers to save 20,000 or 30,000 leones at a time, causing the shops to suffer. He saw a jump in begging in the city’s streets – occasionally even by some of his unemployed friends. ‘But things are difficult even for you,’ he says. ‘So sometimes when they ask, you just have to be honest: I’m sorry, I don’t have enough to give you.’
Bayoh feels angry. He travels frequently to neighbouring Guinea, and the crisis seems much less severe there. ‘At some point, we start to feel we are being governed by incompetent people who give excuses and don’t care about our welfare,’ he says.
Many Sierra Leoneans felt the same way and took to the streets on 10 August 2022 to protest against the rising cost of living. They lit fires, hurled stones at police officers, and called for president Julius Bio to resign. Authorities imposed an internet shutdown, then clamped down on the protest in clashes that quickly turned lethal. At least 21 protesters and six police officers died.
Although Jalloh worried that her organization might not have sufficient resources, she felt she had to do something. She gave the struggling woman two cups of rice, then decided that her organization would start growing and processing cassava. ‘Now we produce soap, gara cloths but also garri (cassava flour),’ she says, to keep the organization afloat and to share profits with the group of women – at a time when many people might not be able to afford anything but food.
‘Although the crisis affects everybody, I try to concentrate on disability because I see us as more vulnerable. If the other people suffer, what about us?’
