Informal Taxation in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Taxpayers’ Experiences and Perceptions
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Research in Brief 15
In low-income and post-conflict countries, and particularly in rural areas, citizens often pay a range of ‘taxes’ that differ substantially from statutory policies. These ‘informal taxes’, paid to a variety of state and non-state actors, are frequently overlooked in analyses of local systems of taxation. This is problematic, as it leads to misunderstandings of individual and household tax burdens, as well as of systems of local governance.
Dr Samuel S. Jibao is the Executive Director of the Centre for Economic Research and Capacity Building in Freetown, and a member of the Investment Board of the National Social Security and Investment Trust (NASSIT) in Sierra Leone. He was the former Commissioner General of the National Revenue Authority Sierra Leone, and a former Senior Lecturer at the African Tax Institute at the Department of Economics in the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Chair of the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI) and former Executive Director of the International Centre for Tax and Development (2020-2024). His research focuses on the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in Africa.
Vanessa van den Boogaard is a Senior Research Fellow at ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Somalia. Vanessa co-leads ICTD's research programmes on informality and gender and tax.
