Agricultural investment and rural transformation: a case study of the Makeni bioenergy project in Sierra Leone

The report evaluates the Makeni Project, a 400 million EUR sugarcane-to-ethanol investment by Addax Bioenergy Sierra Leone (ABSL). While the project has introduced formal wage labour, new infrastructure, and agricultural support through the Farmer Development Programme (FDP), it has also created pressures on natural resources, such as fuelwood and water, and highlighted significant gaps in local skills and government governance. The study concludes that while FDI can catalyze development, it cannot replace the public sector, and the transformative potential of the project is limited by weak institutional capacity and a lack of coordinated public investment to complement private efforts.

• The Makeni Project is the largest agricultural investment in Sierra Leone, consisting of a 10,000 ha sugarcane estate and a distillery producing approximately 85,000 m3 of ethanol annually for export to the EU, as well as 15 MW of electricity for the national grid.
• The project has significantly shifted local employment from subsistence farming to formal wage labour, with 38% of households in project villages having at least one member employed by ABSL as of December 2014.
• The Farmer Development Programme (FDP) has successfully produced large quantities of rice to offset crop losses from land concessions, but there is uncertainty regarding whether farmers can maintain productivity after 'graduating' from the programme.
• The project has led to visible infrastructure improvements, including the construction of an estimated 440 km of roads by June 2014 and a 37% increase in new houses in project villages between October 2013 and April 2014.
• Local communities report negative impacts on natural resources, specifically reduced access to fuelwood and concerns over water quality and availability, with 85% of households in project villages reporting water problems compared to 55% in control villages.
• A significant gap exists between the skills required for ABSL's semi-skilled and management positions and the capacities available in local communities, which has inhibited local hiring for higher-paid roles.
• The project's potential to improve energy access remains unrealized, as local communities are not connected to the power plant's grid and no ethanol is sold locally for cooking or transport.
• The report argues that the transformative potential of private FDI is diminished by the lack of an enabling policy environment and the failure of the public sector to provide complementary investments, such as connecting villages to the roads built by ABSL.
• Sierra Leone's institutional capacity is deemed insufficient to regulate and monitor large-scale agricultural investments, as evidenced by the lack of an official land registry and the stalled approval of the draft Guidelines for Sustainable Agricultural and Bioenergy Investment.

APA

Fielding, M., Davis, M., Weitz, N., Cummings-John, I., Hickey, A., Johnson, F. X., Senyagwa, J., Martinez, L., & Sun, M. (2015). Agricultural investment and rural transformation: a case study of the Makeni bioenergy project in Sierra Leone. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/SEI-PR-2015-09-Makeni-Project-LR.pdf

Chicago

Fielding, Matthew, Marion Davis, Nina Weitz, Ival Cummings-John, Amanda Hickey, Francis X. Johnson, Jacqueline Senyagwa, Lidia Martinez, and Miaojie Sun. Agricultural investment and rural transformation: a case study of the Makeni bioenergy project in Sierra Leone. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2015. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/SEI-PR-2015-09-Makeni-Project-LR.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{fielding2015agricultural, author = {Fielding, Matthew and Davis, Marion and Weitz, Nina and Cummings-John, Ival and Hickey, Amanda and Johnson, Francis X. and Senyagwa, Jacqueline and Martinez, Lidia and Sun, Miaojie}, title = {{Agricultural investment and rural transformation: a case study of the Makeni bioenergy project in Sierra Leone}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2015}, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/Climate/SEI-PR-2015-09-Makeni-Project-LR.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }