Businesses, Employment and Livelihood
Business profitability contributes to the long term sustainability goals. Home Leone has allocated a significant portion of land to support livelihood development and increase resilience. This supports community cash flow. The Sierra Leone business environment is not straight forward. Investors typically require high ROI’s, as reflected by the countries interest rates and lack of investment.
Our concept empowers residents away from the model of dependency, enabling training and business development to act as a way to empower them to thrive and build their own lives in a holistic, sustainable manner.
We built the first 10 business units, shops, stores and generator room and brought in significant tooling to help us deliver the next phase.
The businesses we know will work and are building business plans for are:
- A construction arm where we build homes, schools and other buildings for third parties.
- A brick making factory. This started production in June 2017 and we have made nearly 1 million bricks using clay from our land.
- A garage – This was established and for years served Freetown providing quality work. The facilities remain in place as we re-engineer this to a future of developing garage mechanics training.
- A water bagging factory sells essential filtered clean water
- A bakery is ready to start operations.
- We have fully operating and developing wood and metal fabrications workshops
- A Village Market offers opportunity for trading
In addition we are developing plans for
- A Passion Fruit Farm.
- A care home for the elderly and vulnerable adults.
- A plastics recycling factory.
As things develop we will seek larger and more added-value business opportunities.
Micro Loans
We have gained much learning from a village women’s micro loans programme. We also ran Keh Kehs (local 3 wheel taxis) which provided self- employment for 6 of our residents
Infrastructure
Home Leone has a detailed plan for all aspects of the community’s infrastructure. We are developing schools, football pitches, community centres, vocational training and much more. The main road has been set and a bridge built that opens quicker access to the village from the main road.
