Digitalisation in Sierra Leone: unlocking sustainable and inclusive growth

Mobile coverage in Sierra Leone has grown faster than its use. Internet use was around 19% in 2024, and data remains expensive relative to income. For micro and small enterprises (MSEs), that means mobile money is now common, while the uses that grow a business (selling online, keeping records, using data to decide) are rare, and rarest among informal, rural and women-led firms.

For GSMA Mobile for Development’s Central Insights Unit, in support of the British High Commission in Freetown, IfD is studying whether digitalisation is turning into inclusive growth for these firms, and where it is not, what holds them back and which changes would do most. The study:

• places firms on a ladder of digital use, from no connection to running the business on data, by size, formality, sector and the owner’s gender;
• builds on GSMA’s own measures of the gap between mobile coverage and mobile use, so the findings sit alongside GSMA’s data;
• sets the constraints out across infrastructure and cost, skills, finance, useful products, trust, and regulation;
• applies a gender, disability and social inclusion lens throughout, including women-led against men-led firms, with women-led firms making up about a third of the sample;
• looks closely at agribusiness and financial services.

Fieldwork covers Freetown and regional hubs, with interviews with business owners, mobile network operators, digital finance providers, regulators and business associations, focus groups weighted towards informal entrepreneurs, and all instruments in Krio. A review of comparable countries, such as Kenya, Ghana and Bangladesh, adds case studies of what has worked elsewhere.

IfD brings first-hand experience of running digital tools in Sierra Leone’s mobile-first market through Sabi Salone and Sabi Core.