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The goal of CDC-SL is to provide, expand decent affordable community housing, home ownership; and support services for middle-to-low-income households in communities throughout Sierra Leone in rural Freetown and the provinces. As a not-for-profit organization, its purpose is to provide programs and services that promote and support community development. Above all and most important, CDC-SL will engage in the development of ffordable housing to every honest, hard-working Sierra Leoneans who are willing to live in a community and will claim peaceful ownership of their property.
As a result, our primary mission is threefold: (1) to create and preserve decent affordable housing; (2) end housing over-crowding; and (3) increase home ownership and improve the viability, livability, and economic stability of suburban communities, particularly low- and moderate-income communities outside the city limits.
About Sierra Leone
For eleven years, Sierra Leone was torn apart by civil war. The war began in 1991, when a rebel group (called the Revolutionary United Front) launched a campaign to control the country’s rich diamond fields. The rebels attacked civilians including children all over - villages, towns, major cities, rural areas and Freetown - burning down homes, comitting mass killings using guns, machetes and axes to sever their arms, legs, lips and ears. The internal conflict resulted in an estimated 15,000 deaths, ripped Sierra Leone apart, ravaging the people and infrastructure leaving all of its socio-economic and political structures in disarray.
At different times estimates of the number of displaced people were as high as 2.5 million - more than half of the entire population. As many as half a million persons fled to neighboring countries to escape the civil conflict, and remain outside the country on their own or in refugee camps, primarily in Guinea and Liberia. Over 250,000 citizens crossed the borders into neighboring countries of Guinea and Liberia to escape the conflict; many thousands of others were displaced internally, and fled their homes to hide in wooded areas, or to towns where there are security forces and some degree of protection from rebel forces. However, various assessments indicate that the enormous task of meeting a huge backlog of housing needs is estimated at between 300,000 and 500,000.
More than 12 years later, the country’s reconstruction is slow going, thanks to a large extent, for a relative calm and stability in politics which has led to a revival of economic activity such as the rehabilitation of bauxite and rutile mining, set to benefit from planned tax incentives. Today there is hope with number of offshore oil discoveries were announced in 2009 and 2010. The development on these reserves, which could be significant, is still several years away.
