Sierra Leone: Gender-responsive and inclusive responses to climate migration in Freetown

In Sierra Leone, climate change is accelerating rural-to-urban migration, while increasing the vulnerability of those arriving in rapidly expanding cities. As the primary destination for rural-to-urban migration, Freetown is particularly exposed to these intersecting pressures: the city faces rising sea levels, coastal erosion, flooding, and landslides. Its largely informal and labor-intensive economy is highly vulnerable to extreme heat and humidity, with over 90% of working hours occurring outside of climate-controlled conditions.

Recognizing these realities, Freetown City Council (FCC) treats climate-related rural-to-urban migration and informal settlement growth as features of the city to plan around rather than against. FCC aims to improve conditions and opportunities for migrants and transform informal settlements into assets for shared prosperity, making migration a choice rather than a necessity. It has been implementing the Transform Freetown agenda since 2018 and launched the Climate Action Strategy in 2023, aiming to create 120,000 green jobs for women and youth by 2028.

Thanks to the Freetown the Treetown Initiative, 977,000 trees were planted, and the city committed to planting an additional 4 million by 2028 to reduce the urban heat island effect. The Freetown Waste Micro-Enterprise project employed 240 youths from informal settlements in green jobs, of whom 75% were migrants and internally displaced persons and 30% were women. Launched in 2025, the Climate Resilient Market Hub introduced technologies that convert waste into energy to power refrigerators in the city’s markets, where over 90% of businesses are women-led and most of these are migrant women.

Key takeaways:

1. Freetown the Treetown’s participatory urban greening and settlement upgrading approach shows the value of working with informal communities, and is designed to mitigate the risks of gentrification and displacement of lower-income residents often associated with slum upgrading.
2. Inclusive climate resilience initiatives cannot substitute for the mandate, data, and tools local authorities need to govern land use and manage the city’s growth.
3. Embedding gender and migrant inclusion directly into livelihoods infrastructure – markets, waste systems, green jobs – can be more durable than treating inclusion as a separate track from climate adaptation.
4. Because the same women and migrant workers who power Freetown’s informal economy are also those most exposed to climate risk, resilience investments that strengthen their livelihoods directly deliver adaptation and inclusion gains at once.