In 2017, 1,000 people were dead or missing after devastating mudslides and floods on the outskirts of Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown, and more than 3,000 lost their homes when a section of the Sugar Loaf mountain collapsed amid heavy downpours. As a GFDRR assessment subsequently revealed, the staggering devastation and loss of life might have been avoided or at least minimized if the West African country had a more effective regulatory framework in place to govern the built environment.

Determined to protect lives and livelihoods in a country where more than one-third of the population is vulnerable to natural hazards such as floods and landslides, the government of Sierra Leone has drawn on GFDRR’s support in its renewed efforts to strengthen its building regulatory framework for resilience. GFDRR has most recently focused its support on a deep dive assessment of Sierra Leone’s building regulatory framework, including mapping existing regulations, mechanisms, and processes for ensuring compliance, with an eye toward informing Sierra Leone’s building regulatory reform agenda.

Drawing on in-depth consultations with key stakeholders in government agencies such as the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Country Planning; the Ministry of Local Government and Community Affairs; and the Ministry of Works and Public Assets; local governments across the country; and private sector and professional bodies such as the Sierra Leone Institute of Architects and Sierra Leone Institution of Engineers, the technical team has identified a range of priority actions to strengthen Sierra Leone’s building regulatory framework.

The identified priority actions spanned four areas critical to effective building regulatory frameworks based on international best practices that the technical team found to be lacking in Sierra Leone: building regulatory instruments and associated government implementation capacity, standardization and certification mechanism for construction materials and methods, risk-informed land use planning and integrated building control processes, and capacity of built environment professionals such as architects and engineers.

The technical team found that there is a crucial need to finalize and enact a national building code in Sierra Leone. The country has two draft building codes, one that the government drafted in 2016 and another that the Sierra Leone Institute of Architects drafted in 2021, neither of which were adopted. Sierra Leone lacks the regulatory instruments of an enforceable building code, leading building designers to follow different regulations or none at all. National authorities are thus hindered in their capacity to inspect building work and ensure that minimum requirements have been met.

Even at this early stage of disseminating the findings of the assessment, it is beginning to inform Sierra Leone’s efforts to strengthen its building regulatory framework, which are supported by the Resilient Urban Sierra Leone Project, with a $50 million commitment from the International Development Association (IDA) and a $6.7 million commitment from the Global Environment Facility Sustainable Cities Program. Sierra Leone is moving forward with finalization of its national building code. The assessment is also informing the update of the National Town and Country Planning Act, the principal law governing land use planning in Sierra Leone, and the development of spatial plans to facilitate resilient urban development for all major cities in Sierra Leone.

GFDRR’s support for strengthening building regulations for resilience in Sierra Leone is part of a broader effort by the facility to advance that agenda across Sub-Saharan Africa. As in the case of Sierra Leone, the facility will continue to draw on its expertise to develop analytical work and facilitate dialogue that drives and informs policy actions to ensure safe, resilient built environments. In fiscal year 2023, the facility supported a comprehensive assessment of building regulations in 48 Sub-Saharan African countries that provided key entry points for reform in each of those countries.