Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr: Sierra Leone Telegraph: 29 January 2025:
Eight years ago, one of the worst natural disasters in Sierra Leone’s history had a devastating impact on the country’s capital. A thousand people perished in Freetown due to unprecedented flooding and destructive mudslides. This wasn’t a once-in-a-century catastrophe; it resulted from massive, man-made deforestation. It was, in other words, preventable.
Nine months later, I took office as the city’s mayor. My top priority? Ensuring that such devastation never happens again.
Freetown had experienced five decades of tree loss. But I knew that we didn’t have five decades more to reverse it. After all, Freetown is one of Africa’s rainiest cities. I also knew that we couldn’t rely on the national government alone to do it.
So, like ever more cities are attempting around the world, my team and I thought outside the box. And together, we developed Freetown the Treetown, a concept supported by a number of donors, particularly the World Bank.
The idea was simple: The municipality would pay residents to grow trees. Using a digital platform built by our city, residents could plant saplings along vulnerable, targeted slopes, determined in dialogue with neighbors. Then, they could monitor the trees’ growth by tagging and tracking them with digital tokens. These tokens, when collected and sold, could fund further planting. It was a community-designed, community-powered innovation with an ambitious aim of planting one million new trees.
This aspiration reflected the scope of our need, not the scope of our resources. Undeterred, my administration worked to rally the support necessary to scale and sustain the effort, including those outside of Freetown’s city limits. We found that partnership in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, a global ideas competition for municipalities.
The charitable organization of former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of the largest in the world focused, in part, on facilitating local government innovation—support that right now, cities require more than ever.
For Freetown, the program’s application process provided the technical assistance we needed to model, test, and refine our concept.
In the end, our efforts proved successful. Freetown was one of 15 cities selected by Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2022 to receive $1 million in funding from the Mayors Challenge. Paired with leading capacity and implementation support, the program propelled us from thinking big to rising to the occasion and delivering for our residents.
Within months, we rapidly expanded our reforestation efforts, working with Bloomberg Philanthropies’ subject-matter experts, which bolstered our city’s capacity to marshal the entirety of Freetown’s talents and passion. We brought in a sustainable forestry company, partnered with local leaders, and galvanized citizens.
Already, we have significantly increased our canopy cover. As a result, nearly 2,500 acres—the equivalent of 1,300 soccer fields—have been restored, creating safer, healthier living conditions for thousands of residents. We also recognized the initiative could help the city in other ways, including to address our youth unemployment crisis, ultimately creating over 1,000 green jobs.
Now, Freetown is raising the bar. We plan to quintuple our efforts and plant five million total trees by 2030—a number others might have thought unimaginable, but which I always knew was not just possible, but plausible.
At the same time, I understand that the problems we face aren’t exclusive to Freetown. That’s why we stand ready and willing to provide guidance to other cities interested in learning about our model—and eager to learn from others. In fact, that favor of idea-sharing has already been returned.
Soon, Freetown will adapt and incubate a visionary program hailing from Bogota, Colombia called Care Blocks. Another winner of the Mayors Challenge, it redistributes the burden carried by 1.2 million unpaid female caregivers citywide. With the care economy in shambles worldwide, Bogota’s city government decided to take matters into its own hands by building care blocks that provide jobs and educational training, medical care, and well-being supports—from dance classes to swim lessons—to otherwise underserved women.
Now, Freetown will as well, be adapting and implementing this intervention to help close the gender gap in our workforce.
Of course, the prospect of developing answers to pressing problems, or sourcing and tailoring them from other places, can seem daunting. Mayors, after all, must also run the day-in and day-out of our cities. But as the issues facing localities grow in scale and scope, so too must local governments’ ability to confront them—and move communities forward.
Like Freetown has found, creative philanthropic supports do exist to help cities reach their potential. Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation programming is enabling just that.
The organization has recently announced a new Mayors Challenge competition, calling on municipalities to band together with residents and entrepreneurs to reimagine a fundamental service, from affordable housing to public transportation to waste management.
I urge my fellow mayors to make every effort to engage, and shift their residents’ perspectives on what they should expect from their government. And for those facing unexpected or emerging issues in need of proven fixes already working elsewhere, the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange offers a single destination where municipalities can mine, learn, and replicate solutions from other cities.
My sincere hope is that even more city halls join the thousands of local officials—including my team in Freetown—who are already part of this movement. We see firsthand that it is not states or nations but cities proving the intractable is solvable, and that government innovation is a necessity for those of us in the business of improving lives—for all of us unwilling to settle for anything less.
About the author
Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr is the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone.
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