The Minister of Youth Affairs Ibrahim Sannoh unveiled 50 electric vehicles as part of a youth empowerment package announced during August 2025 International Youth Day celebrations, with priority given to women drivers to promote gender equality in the transport sector.
The initiative, known as Sierra Ride, represents an unusual convergence of interests. The United Nations Development Programme supports it. The Government of Sierra Leone owns it. Young people, particularly women who have been systematically excluded from income-generating opportunities in Sierra Leone’s transport sector, stand to benefit from it. And the climate which has no political affiliation but every person’s future may benefit from it too. On paper, it looks like the sort of programme that should work. On the ground, the test of whether it actually does has only just begun.
To understand why fifty electric vehicles matter in Freetown, you must first understand what they are replacing. Traditional three-wheelers, known locally as kekes, consume about four litres of gasoline per 100 kilometres, contributing significantly to air pollution which is annually linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths across Africa. Freetown, like most West African cities, has a transport crisis. The vehicles that move people are old, unreliable, expensive to operate, and lethal to the environment. They are also sometimes the only income opportunity available to young people without formal education, capital, or connections.
Youth unemployment in Sierra Leone remains one of the nation’s most intractable problems. Official figures consistently show unemployment rates between 30 and 40 percent for people aged 15 to 24. But those numbers obscure a deeper reality: many young people are not counted in unemployment statistics because they have given up looking for formal work. They are absorbed into informal transport, petty trading, and precarious hustles that offer income but no security, no benefits, and no pathway to stability. For young women, the constraints are even tighter. Access to driving income, particularly in the competitive keke market, has been controlled by men and male networks. Breaking into that market requires capital, connections, and often a willingness to navigate harassment and exclusion.
Sierra Ride addresses both problems simultaneously. It places electric vehicles into the hands of young drivers, eliminating the capital constraint. It prioritises women, directly challenging the gender exclusion that has defined the informal transport sector. And it pairs the vehicles with an app-based system, modernising what has historically been a chaotic, cash-based, largely unregulated transport market. In theory, Sierra Ride is elegant. In practice, it is untested.
One critical detail has become apparent over the past months: for fifty electric vehicles to function, you need charging infrastructure. The initiative includes innovative features such as solar-powered battery-swapping stations deployed to ensure operational efficiency. This is important because traditional charging infrastructure the kind built in wealthy nations requires reliable electricity grids and substantial upfront capital investment. Sierra Leone’s electricity supply is unreliable in the best of circumstances. Battery-swapping stations, theoretically, solve that problem. A driver uses a full battery during the day, swaps it for a charged one in the evening, and the depleted battery charges overnight using solar power.
It is an elegant solution. It is also unproven at scale in West Africa. Questions remain unanswered. Where exactly will these battery-swapping stations be located? How many are operational now? How many will be operational by the time the first batch of drivers begins using their vehicles in earnest? Who owns and operates them? What happens if a driver’s vehicle runs out of charge far from a swapping station? What is the cost structure will drivers pay per charge, per swap, or per kilometre? These are not theoretical problems. They are the difference between a functioning service and a dysfunctional one.
Equally important is whether the economics actually work. This initiative builds on UNDP’s recent efforts to empower young women with technical and vocational skills, with 250 young women certified in 2026 in fields such as auto mechanics and renewable energy systems. That training is valuable—it creates a workforce that can maintain these vehicles locally rather than relying on imported expertise. But training and vehicles alone do not create a sustainable business.
For Sierra Ride to succeed, it must answer a simple question: can drivers earn more money operating electric vehicles than they currently earn operating fuel-powered kekes? Operating costs for electric vehicles are lower than for fuel-powered ones electricity is cheaper than petrol, maintenance is simpler, and the vehicles produce no emissions. But the app-based system, if it operates like Uber, will take a commission on each ride. The government will need to regulate fares to ensure affordability for passengers which will constraint driver earnings. Drivers will need to service loans or repayment agreements if they don’t own the vehicles outright. Somewhere in that equation, there is a break-even point. If it tips the wrong direction, drivers will return to fuel-powered kekes, and Sierra Ride becomes another government project that looked good on paper but failed in practice.
No publicly available information has been released detailing the projected profitability for drivers, the fare structure, the commission rate, or the loan terms. Those details are critical. They will determine whether this programme creates genuine livelihoods or merely temporary work.
Any scepticism about whether Sierra Ride will succeed is not born from cynicism. It is born from experience. Sierra Leone has a long history of ambitious development programmes that arrive with fanfare and dissolve into dysfunction. The biometric driver’s license system, introduced years ago, exists but is applied inconsistently. Public transportation initiatives have been launched, funded, and abandoned. Electricity reform projects have been announced repeatedly with modest results. Youth employment programmes have been designed and rolled out only to be starved of funding or derailed by bureaucratic inertia.
What distinguishes Sierra Ride from some of those initiatives is the partnership structure. UNDP brings technical expertise and a reputation to protect. The government has made a public commitment. The vehicles are physically present they are not theoretical. But presence is not implementation. Presence is not sustainability.
For this writer, success for Sierra Ride would look like the following: one year from now, 40 of the 50 vehicles are operational and in daily use. Drivers are earning incomes that exceed what they would earn in comparable informal transport work. Women drivers have not faced systematic harassment or exclusion by male competitors. The battery-swapping network is functional and accessible across Freetown. Passenger feedback is positive. Environmental monitoring shows measurable reduction in local air pollution. Drivers are successfully managing loan repayments or purchase agreements. And the government and UNDP have committed to a second and third phase of expansion, not because they have surplus budget, but because the first phase demonstrated genuine demand and sustainability.
Read Also: CID Detains Born To Blog CEO Over Social Media Campaign Post
That is a high bar. It should be. The stakes are not merely fiscal. They are about whether young Sierra Leoneans particularly young women can be given genuine opportunity or merely the appearance of it.
The vehicles sit at Water Quay. Soon, they will be distributed to drivers. An app will be launched. Passengers will hail rides. The market will begin its verdict. Over the coming months and years, the question will not be whether fifty electric vehicles can exist in Freetown. The question will be whether they can exist there sustainably, whether they can enrich the lives of the young people who drive them, and whether they can serve as the foundation for a transport system that is genuinely modern, genuinely green, and genuinely capable of creating wealth for Sierra Leoneans rather than extracting it.
