The purpose of this paper is to establish a baseline level of knowledge on the current state of local
level justice institutions and access to justice in Sierra Leone’s provinces. This entails a review of
what is known and gaps in the knowledge base, coupled with an analysis of recent events, possible
entry points, and opportunities for intervention. This background will provide direction for ongoing
field research in Sierra Leone, and will help to identify practical solutions to problems of inaccess
and inequitable access to justice.
This paper was commissioned by the World Bank’s Justice for the Poor (J4P) program, a global research
and development program aimed at informing and supporting pro-poor approaches to justice
reform.1
J4P’s approach is to emphasize social and cultural contexts to generate empirically-based
understandings of how the poor navigate and/or are excluded from existing dispute resolution and
decision-making mechanisms. At its core, this approach centers around a more localized view of
justice than typical justice programs, emphasizing an understanding of “justice” through the
perspectives of users and building on these understandings to implement culturally-appropriate
reforms. Recognizing that comprehensive justice reform is a protracted process, requiring
substantial engagement and investment by a wide variety of actors, J4P implements locallyresponsive
interventions that have a visible effect in the short-term, while providing a catalyst for
sustainable, long-term improvement.
In this preliminary phase of research, the primary source of information for this paper was a
comprehensive literature review. The review included an exploration of legal documents (including
laws and statutes, and case summaries where available), historical documents, anthropological texts,
current social and political pieces (including newspaper articles, political speeches, and findings from
committees of inquiry), and the findings from on-going or recently completed field research
projects. While these sources have helped develop a context for this report, and have been crosschecked
for appropriateness and validity where possible, there are several potentials problems
associated with reliance on secondary sources. These include, inter alia, lack of information on
research methodologies, bias or agenda of sources, reliability over place and time, and differences in
definitions of key concepts (for example, “informal”, “grievance”, or “youth”). Furthermore,
literature related to the civil war is ex-post, and many of the studies cited may rely on small sample
sizes or are difficult to generalize.
This literature review is both by intent and necessity quite rudimentary, reflecting the dearth of
recent research on local-level justice systems and processes in Sierra Leone. Thus, the ideas
presented in this report should not be read as conclusive, but rather as hypotheses requiring further
study, analysis, and discussion on many levels. The J4P program’s ongoing field research in Sierra
Leone seeks to provide in-depth analyses that will supplement the present knowledge base and
address these gaps. In this way, the research and literature review will contribute to development of
a firm foundation for effective justice reform interventions in Sierra Leone.