The Role of the Chinese Community in Sierra Leone’s Development: Assessing Contributions, Challenges, and Future Prospects within the Framework of South-South Cooperation

Abstract

The Chinese community in Sierra Leone has grown from a handful of technical assistance personnel in the early 1970s into a diverse population of contractors, miners, traders, medical professionals, and entrepreneurs whose activities now touch nearly every sector of the national economy. Yet scholarship on China in Africa has concentrated on large states such as Ethiopia, Zambia, and Angola, leaving small post-conflict economies underexamined. This article assesses the contributions, challenges, and future prospects of the Chinese community in Sierra Leone from the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1971 to the present, situating the analysis within the framework of South-South Cooperation. The study adopts a qualitative dominant, embedded mixed-methods design grounded in critical realism, combining documentary analysis of government, Chinese, and multilateral sources with secondary statistics, institutional analysis, thematic analysis, and eight enterprise case studies, benchmarked against six comparator African countries. The findings show substantial Chinese contributions to infrastructure delivery, mineral and fisheries investment, employment creation, health system support, scholarship provision, and crisis response during the Ebola and COVID-19 emergencies, alongside persistent problems of labour disputes, environmental damage, weak local linkages, tax compliance gaps, and thin technology transfer. The article’s original contribution is a transmission-channel framework linking community-level Chinese economic activity to structural transformation through investment, employment, infrastructure, technology, human capital, trade, and institutional capacity, conditioned by governance quality and absorptive capacity. The policy implications centre on enforcing local content and environmental rules, converting enclave investment into linkage-rich investment, institutionalising dispute resolution, and using the Belt and Road Initiative, FOCAC, and the African Continental Free Trade Area to reposition Sierra Leone within Chinese value chains on more favourable terms.