Land Rights in Sierra Leone: The Laws and What They Protect

Two systems, one Constitution, new statutory protection

The Constitution protects property, but it does not erase the dual system: statutory freehold in the towns and the Western Area, customary ownership in the provinces, exercised through families and chiefdom institutions. For a long time that duality bred opacity. Maps were incomplete, deals were often spoken rather than written, and community rights could be bargained away without a document to show for it. Donor-backed work, including a World Bank land administration project, found that only a small share of land is mapped and registered, and that the sense of insecure tenure was widespread enough to justify reform. The law recognises both systems; the reforms try to record and protect customary rights rather than sweep them away.

Two statutes are central. The Customary Land Rights Act of 2022 creates a statutory framework for family, community and chiefdom land under customary law, and sets out certification, consent and community procedures that must happen before any lease or investment proceeds. It requires customary transactions to be certified at chiefdom level and registered at district land offices, and it gives affected communities the right to free, prior and informed consent before an investor can move ahead. The National Land Commission Act of 2022 sets up the National Land Commission and a national land register meant to bring state, private and customary records together and make registration more transparent. The two work as a pair: one defines how customary rights are evidenced and protected, the other builds the machinery to record and manage them.

What the law now requires

When I take a community leader or an official through the statute, I go to the places where a promise becomes an enforceable duty. Consent and certification come first. Where a family head wants to enter a transaction affecting family land, the Act requires the written, informed consent of a defined proportion of the adult family members, with documentary or thumbprint evidence of that consent, and the transaction must be certified by the chiefdom body before it can be presented for district registration. That certification step is statutory, not cosmetic, and it is a precondition for registration. In effect the Act moves customary dealings off the oral ground where disputes grow and onto a documentary record that officials have to honour.

Free, prior and informed consent is the second pillar. Before an investment can proceed, the Act requires written consent from the affected community, and it sets real limits on large investments, including restrictions on how long a non-citizen may hold a customary lease, caps on the size of the land parcels that can be taken initially for agriculture and mining, and an expectation that communities share in the benefits. These are statutory constraints a court can enforce, which turns community consent and the statutory ceilings into conditions that a valid lease depends on. The exact figures for lease length, hectare caps and reserved shareholding are set out in the Act, and anyone negotiating or challenging a deal should read them against the specific sector.

Gender and participation come third. The Act treats family land as vested in the family and gives adult women and men equal rights to it, and the land committees that manage community decisions must include women, with the National Land Commission Act requiring at least 30 per cent female representation on local land committees. The Customary Land Rights Act also says a person cannot be denied the right to own or use land on the basis of gender, tribe, religion, age, marital status or economic status. Those provisions give a lawyer a clear text to rely on where women are shut out of a negotiation or a family head acts alone.

Registration is the fourth pillar. The national register is intended to hold state, private and customary entries, so that a citizen or investor need not rely on oral assurance alone. Until the Commission’s systems are fully running, gaps remain, many rural parcels are still unmapped, and capacity will decide how fast the protections become real security on the ground, which is what the World Bank-supported mapping is meant to address.

How this plays out

If a mining company produces a lease and a village later objects, two questions decide it. Was the community properly informed, and was the required consent obtained and recorded. If there is no chiefdom certification and no minutes recording the meeting the law requires, the lease is open to challenge, because the Act makes certification and consent preconditions.

In the same way, if a family head signs a long lease without showing that the required proportion of adult family members gave written, informed consent, a court can set the transaction aside. And where women were kept off a negotiating committee, the statutory guarantee of representation gives a clear basis for relief. These are not hypothetical niceties. They are the precise points of leverage that lawyers and judges now have.

The short version

Sierra Leone is still a dual-tenure country. The Customary Land Rights Act and the National Land Commission Act, both of 2022, bring customary claims into a framework that can be documented, certified and registered. Communities must be informed and must give written, free, prior and informed consent before an investor project proceeds on customary land. Family land deals need the specified written consent and chiefdom certification before they can be registered.

The National Land Commission and the donor-backed mapping aim to make these rights visible and enforceable, though capacity limits mean the benefits will arrive over time. Behind it all, the Constitution’s protection of property and equality remains the backstop.

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