Freetown, Sierra Leone
#00178
Case study of
#00183 Create a funded municipal heat office with an annually updated heat action plan
Implementer
Freetown City Council, Chief Heat Officer Eugenia Kargbo, under Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr
Timeline
Since Jan 1, 2021
Location
Description
Freetown appointed Africa's first Chief Heat Officer, Eugenia Kargbo, in 2021, under Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr. The signature intervention is market shade covers in three markets, co-designed with the market women who work under them. The office links to the #FreetownTheTreeTown greening campaign. The city installed its first two weather stations with World Bank support, building the monitoring baseline it previously lacked. A formal Heat Action Plan was launched in February 2025. There is no mortality evaluation because baseline health and temperature data were absent prior to these stations — which is why monitoring infrastructure is treated as a prerequisite, not an afterthought. The binding constraint on scaling is external donor funding.
Metrics
3Funding
Lessons learned
- Co-designing shade infrastructure with the directly affected group (market women) produces installations that are used and maintained — skip co-design and you risk unused infrastructure.
- Installing weather and mortality baseline monitoring is a first investment, not an afterthought: without it, impact evaluation is impossible and funders have no data to justify scaling.
- In a low-income city, a heat office can plan and pilot on donor seed funding, but scaling is contingent on external grants it does not control — teams should map and pursue named funding programmes (e.g., Arsht-Rockefeller, World Bank resilience grants) before committing to city-scale targets.
Documented Jul 24, 2026