Inside Africa: Vision 2025 Is Over, What Did Sierra Leone Actually Build
In 2003, emerging from a decade-long civil war that left more than 50,000 dead and its institutions in ruins, Sierra Leone dared to imagine what it could become. Vision 2025, launched under President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah through a participatory process involving over 8,000 Sierra Leoneans, government planners, the UNDP, and regional experts, described four possible futures the country could inhabit by 2025. The most ambitious, called “Sweet-Salone”, envisioned equitable governance, strong economic growth, investor confidence, and broad development gains. Two decades later, the deadline has passed. The question, as 2026 begins, is not whether Sierra Leone became Sweet-Salone (it did not) but what the country actually built, what the framework got wrong, and what the reckoning tells us about how governments and institutions set long-term reform goals.
The macro numbers offer a partial answer. Sierra Leone's GDP per capita in 2024 stood at approximately $807, making it one of the poorest economies in West Africa, far short of the middle-income threshold that the vision implied. Growth has been positive, projected at 4.3 percent in 2025, driven primarily by mining and agriculture. Inflation, which peaked well above 50 percent in 2023, had fallen to 4.4 percent by October 2025 following tighter macroeconomic policies and exchange rate stabilisation under an IMF Extended Credit Facility arrangement approved in late 2024. In narrow terms of macroeconomic stabilisation, there is genuine progress to record.
But stabilisation is not transformation, and the architecture that Vision 2025 was supposed to build – diversified, private-sector-led, institutionally grounded – is largely absent. The World Bank's November 2025 Sierra Leone Economic Update, titled “Enabling the Private Sector for Growth and Job Creation,” is almost diagnostic in its conclusions. Fiscal deficits exceeded budget targets for the fourth consecutive year, undermining policy credibility and debt sustainability. A banking-sovereign nexus, in which banks load up on government securities rather than extending credit to businesses, continues to crowd out private sector lending and poses a systemic risk to macroeconomic stability, a pattern the IMF's 2024 Article IV report identifies as a structural legacy of years of fiscal dominance over monetary policy. Access to finance, electricity, land, and basic infrastructure, combined with regulatory inefficiency and chronic macroeconomic instability, remain what the World Bank calls "systemic constraints" to private sector growth.
The jobs picture makes the human cost of that stagnation legible. The World Bank estimates that Sierra Leone's economy needs to create a minimum of 75,000 jobs per year to absorb new labour market entrants and maintain a stable employment-to-population ratio, a target that current growth patterns and private sector conditions make impossible to reach. GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, has grown at a compound annual rate of roughly 1.8 percent over the past five years, a pace at which meaningful income gains take generations. Vision 2025 was designed to compress that timeline. It did not.
The governance story is equally clarifying. Vision 2025 explicitly called for the creation of a National Vision Council, chaired by a “well-respected, non-partisan, dignified Sierra Leonean”, to track progress and hold the government accountable to the vision's targets over time. The council was never meaningfully established. Numerous independent observers, including the European Union, noted a persistent lack of transparency in communicating and publishing disaggregated results. By 2025, public trust in Sierra Leone's Electoral Commission had fallen to 34 percent, nearly half its 2018 level of 64 percent, the second-steepest institutional trust decline recorded by Afrobarometer in the country, behind only Parliament, which lost 34 percentage points. Trust in the presidency, at 53 percent, is 17 percentage points lower than in 2012. The 2023 general elections, disputed by the main opposition and criticised by both the EU Election Observation Mission and the Carter Center for flawed voter registration processes and a lack of transparency in tabulation, deepened those fractures. Five months after the vote, the government put down a coup attempt involving more than a dozen soldiers.
None of this means Vision 2025 was without value. The framework preserved a focus on national goals through multiple administrations, maintained post-war peace, and helped anchor donor engagement. The IMF's 2024 Article IV assessment acknowledged that the country’s previous ECF arrangement “served as a critical policy anchor” even as it “failed to deliver on all its objectives.” The country did not become Dombolo, the vision's worst-case scenario of deep socio-political regression and conflict resurgence. That is not a trivial fact for a country that was, in 2003, still counting its dead.
But the Democracy in Africa assessment published in February 2026 is precise about where the framework's limitations lie. "Sierra Leone does not lack good policies; rather, the implementation of these policies has always been the issue." Vision 2025 set ambitious targets but left the mechanisms for accountability, the National Vision Council, the disaggregated reporting, and the institutional checks either underfunded or unbuilt. And the IMF's own December 2025 review of the current ECF arrangement flagged "reform fatigue" as a significant risk, noting that the scale of fiscal adjustment required is substantial, and political will to sustain it remains uncertain.
Sierra Leone is now looking toward Vision 2030 and a new six-year governance roadmap developed by the African Peer Review Mechanism. The goals are familiar. Institutional strengthening, inclusive growth, fiscal credibility, and private sector vitality. The architecture is, again, ambitious. Whether the monitoring mechanisms will be more robust this time, whether there will, finally, be a functioning body that tracks progress, publishes results, and holds governments accountable to their own targets, is the question that will determine whether Sierra Leone's next decade produces better answers than the last. The vision was never the problem. The accountability was.
