Customary Land Rights

Over 95% of Sierra Leone’s land mass is governed under customary tenure systems. These lands are endowed with rich natural resources that are critical to rural livelihoods and national development, supporting agriculture, mining, forestry, and large-scale investments.

Despite their importance, customary land rights remain highly vulnerable. Outdated legal frameworks, the absence of reliable and real-time land data, and the lack of a functional and accessible land information system have significantly weakened tenure security. As a result, landowning families and communities are often left exposed to dispossession, exclusion, and abuse.

Historically, land acquisition processes have been highly centralized. Investors typically negotiate directly with the central government in Freetown, which then engages Paramount Chiefs or other local authorities in the target areas. Too often, however, the actual landowning families and affected communities are inadequately consulted or completely excluded from decision-making processes.

This practice directly contradicts the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), which emphasize Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a fundamental principle for land-based investments. When communities are denied meaningful participation, land deals become sources of tension rather than development.

In many cases, communities have attempted to resist the takeover of their ancestral lands. Such resistance is frequently met with intimidation, suppression, or coercion by state and local authorities. Individuals and families who refuse to surrender their land often find themselves trapped in prolonged conflicts with investors, contributing to the widespread community-investor disputes observed across Sierra Leone today.

What Are We Doing?

Community empowerment is at the core of our work on land rights in Sierra Leone. We believe that tenure security and customary land rights are inseparable, each reinforces the other. When one is threatened, both are undermined.

As a civil society platform, our mission is to strengthen the capacity of communities to understand, claim, and defend their land rights against abuse, marginalization, and exclusion. We work directly with landowning families, women, youth, and traditional authorities to demystify land laws and governance processes, enabling communities to engage confidently and from an informed position.

Our approach includes:

• Legal awareness and rights education on customary land tenure, FPIC, and land governance frameworks
• Community support in negotiations with investors and authorities to promote transparency and fairness
• Amplifying community voices by collecting grassroots perspectives and channeling them to district, national, and policy-making platforms
• Advocacy for inclusive land reforms that reflect the lived realities, priorities, and aspirations of rural communities

Through these efforts, we aim to ensure that land governance in Sierra Leone is people-centered, equitable, and conflict-sensitive, and that development does not come at the expense of the rights, dignity, and livelihoods of customary landowners