The informal economy: women working at the margins
- ellenarnison
- May 19
- 2 min read
In Sierra Leone, women face a difficult employment landscape, with opportunities for secure formal employment remaining scarce
In Sierra Leone, women face a difficult employment landscape, with opportunities for secure, formal employment remaining scarce. Only 4.7% of women across the whole country have secure jobs.
Instead, many women – particularly those in rural, hard-to-read areas - find themselves drawn into the informal sector, engaging in vulnerable forms of employment that offer little protection against poverty and economic shocks. This sees women earning money through agriculture, petty trading, and other informal enterprises dominate, with 42.2% in agriculture alone.
While the informal sector is vital to Sierra Leone’s economy because so many people depend in it both for income and for a supply of affordable goods, it is also fraught with instability. Vulnerable employment — characterized by self-employment and unpaid family work — is where 91.7% of women find themselves. Despite attempts to improve education and other economic development measures, this figure has remained largely unchanged for decades.
Petty trading is the main activity of 71% of the female labour force. This is the small-scale buying and selling of goods such as foodstuffs, toiletries or small household goods. It takes place from market stalls, the trader’s own home or by street vending. Petty traders rarely have business premises or hold regular hours of business.
Informal trading allows women to work around their domestic responsibilities and within the societal expectations of their roles. In many cases their children will help them in their business.
While education is widely accepted as a pathway to better employment, in Sierra Leone, it rarely prepares students for the reality of life in the informal economy. An academic curriculum does not address the skills necessary for the inevitable life of petty trading and small-scale entrepreneurship, leaving many young women ill-equipped to navigate the sector they are most likely to join. This misalignment between education and economic reality underscores the need for more practical, context-specific training that recognizes the inevitability of informal work for many.
While women in Sierra Leone are resourceful and determined, formal employment opportunities are extremely limited, and the labour market is shaped by deep social and financial barriers. Prosper has built a solution grounded in this reality, offering practical, image-based training that helps women strengthen the informal businesses they already rely on and manage their income in ways that reflect the complexities of their daily lives.
