Sierra Leone is a rare example of a low-income country where the government funds scaled-up nationwide front-line legal advice, assistance and representation for civil and criminal matters. Launched in 2015, the Legal Aid Board (LAB) has offices across the country. It assisted 160 000 people in 2023, two-thirds of them women and girls. The LAB is also by far the most popular justice institution in the country.

Large-scale, consistent, core government funding has enabled the LAB to provide this scaled-up nationwide service. The Government of Sierra Leone provided 78% of the LAB’s $1.1-million a year income in 2021–23.

The scale of the LAB’s operations has driven down its unit costs, creating a virtuous circle with lowering unit costs enabling further scale-up. Unit costs fell by a factor of three between 2018 and 2023. In 2023, each case where the LAB provided legal advice, assistance or representation, cost an average of $11. This is well below ODI’s benchmark of $20 per case for low-income countries. LAB’s low unit cost is particularly remarkable as a quarter of its costs are attributable to providing legal representation for criminal cases.

The platform for this success story is Sierra Leone’s innovative 2012 Legal Aid Act, which recognised paralegals as part of the justice system and adopted a mixed model of criminal and civil legal aid, embracing the role of both lawyers and paralegals. This de-regulated model allowed the LAB to operate cost effectively, deploying its staff efficiently. This, together with its frugal, innovative approach (including its pioneering approach to child maintenance payments) has enabled the LAB to take its operations to scale.

Despite LAB’s expansion, it has less than half the number of paralegals it requires, limiting its ability to reach Sierra Leone’s most marginalised and vulnerable communities. The scope for increased government funding is limited: the Government of Sierra Leone spends more on justice as it does on health, spending proportionately double the funding on both justice and legal aid that donor countries spend in their countries. Bilateral donors previously provided significant funding to the justice sector, but withdrew when the LAB was launched.

There has been no independent in-depth evaluation of the LAB’s performance. This is because Sierra Leone does not have a justice sector research budget, and there is limited donor engagement. There is a strong case for rigorous research to investigate the impact of the LAB’s scaled-up model of front-line justice service delivery in a low-income country. ODI’s initial conservative estimate is that the benefit - cost ratio of child maintenance cases is 50:1 (comparable to estimated global rates of return for some of the most cost-effective interventions in the health sector). This deserves further analysis, as well as the broader impact of the LAB’s front-line justice services - as an enabler for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Report by the Overseas Development Institute