Community
Survey 2026
Findings on living conditions and priorities across four Freetown communities, with a separate look at Fourah Bay College.
0 responses · April 2026 · Preliminary report · First findings
About this survey.
It rests on two sources: a survey of 609 people across the communities, and early group conversations with community leaders.
About this survey.
It rests on two sources: a survey of 609 people across the communities, and early group conversations with community leaders.
Communities were chosen for their range of size, location and conditions. Within each, field teams worked through different sections (residential areas, markets and transport points), approaching people systematically rather than only those easiest to reach, and aiming for a spread across gender, age and occupation. Of 615 forms collected, 6 were set aside as ambiguous, leaving 609.
Field teams surveyed residents in April 2026 using one questionnaire in English and Krio, covering demographics, problems, current coping, the support people want, their top priority, and what would stop them using a new service. Six enumerators collected the bulk of responses. Most questions allowed multiple answers, so percentages sum to more than 100.
Across all groups the sample skews young and active. On most problems men and women answered alike, with two exceptions: men reported drug abuse (63% vs 49%) and unemployment (51% vs 39%) more often. The four-community analysis covers 476 respondents; Fourah Bay College students (97) and on-campus residents (36) are reported separately.
The support question’s preset options did not include infrastructure. That demand is captured instead through the free-text answers analysed later in this report.
Water runs through everything.
Around seven in ten respondents named water or sanitation in every group,
communities and students alike. In the four communities, a quarter chose it
as the single thing to fix first, ahead of everything else.
Sanitation
Asked for the biggest problems,
people answered with the
conditions of daily survival.
- Drug / substance abuse: 56%
- Unemployment: 45%
- Insecurity: 30%
- Poor healthcare: 22%
- Poverty: 22%
- Poor education: 17%
- Gender-based violence: 16%
- Mental health: 11%
Asked what would help,
they named skills and work.
- Skills training: 65%
- Job opportunities: 55%
- Business / financial: 44%
- Youth programs: 26%
- Education support: 25%
- Women & girls support: 22%
- Health services: 21%
- Information / awareness: 18%
- Mental health support: 14%
- Water, sanitation & waste: 11%
- Electricity / power: 7%
Figure 1 — problems named and support requested as polar-area blooms, four communities (n=476).
The finding
deepens in the
written answers.
No question asked how problems affect daily life, yet close to two hundred responses volunteered the same chain unprompted: water is far, the trip eats the day, and the cost falls on children and women.
- CauseWater is far and scarce
- CauseHours spent fetching, often at night
- CostLost school & study time
- CostLost trading income & jobs
- CostGirls exposed to harm at night
- Water is far and scarce
- Hours spent fetching, often at night
- Lost school & study time
- Lost trading income & jobs
- Girls exposed to harm at night
“The time used to study is what they spend on searching for water.”
Resident · Aberdeen
“Most of our girls wake at midnight to fetch water.”
Resident · Aberdeen
“Because of the lack of a water facility, our children are getting pregnant.”
Resident · Grafton
† Because people raised this unprompted and independently across different places, it carries more weight than any tick-box.
The burden is not
spread evenly.
Water aside, the four communities look different
from one another, and the differences matter
for anyone deciding where to act.
Figure 3 — problem prevalence within each community. Each bubble is a problem, sized by the respondents who named it; click one to break it down by community. The coral arc tracks prevalence share.
Kroobay carries the heaviest load.
Highest insecurity, poor health, GBV and mental health strain; near the top on drug abuse (65%). Asks for the most help: skills training at 73%. The problems are stacked, not isolated.
Fourah Bay is out of work.
Highest demand for jobs of any community (77%, just above skills training at 75%): people, but little work to absorb them. Also the highest drug abuse of the four (68%).
Grafton's pain is specific.
Highest water figure, but lower rates of drug abuse, GBV and mental health strain. Its distress sits in infrastructure rather than social breakdown.
Aberdeen sits lower on poor health.
But not across the board: it has the highest poverty mention of the four (26%) and mid-range unemployment. Water still affects most of it.
Conversations with community leaders put detail behind these numbers.
These were small group discussions, a handful of chiefs, councillors, market and traditional leaders in each community, so they are directional rather than representative. But they describe what the survey could only count.
Aberdeen
Leaders described hunger and the absence of work pushing young women into survival sex work, framed as desperation rather than choice, with women wanting a way out. They also reported police and local authorities seizing female traders’ goods under the banner of keeping order, and no public toilets, forcing people to use the sea.
Grafton & Polio Community
The sharpest issue was the exclusion of disabled residents: amputees and polio survivors pushed aside at water pumps by able-bodied people, and broken roads trapping mobility-impaired residents at home through the rainy season, cut off from medical care.
Kroobay
The water problem is also one of flooding and sanitation: poor drainage that leaves water standing in the rains, and public toilets shared between far too many households.
What people ask
for when you
let them speak.
“I have a welding shop but I lack the tools to use.”
The support question offered nine fixed options, none of them infrastructure.
People could write in anything the list missed, and 118 community respondents did.
Their write-ins were led, by a wide margin, by water and sanitation, then electricity.
Figure 4. Infrastructure asked for in free-text support answers: % of the 118 community respondents who wrote one in, count in brackets. None of these were options on the form.
This also resolves the gap
between problems and
support seen earlier.
People were not setting water aside in favour of skills; the support question gave them no way to ask for it. Among the 118 who wrote in, 43% named water or WASH infrastructure and 30% electricity.
A second, quieter signal:
tools, not training.
A handful asked for the specific tools of a trade rather than training, where the barrier to earning is equipment, not skill.
What communities propose.
Their proposals were practical, specific, and consistent across very different places.
Infrastructure, built to last
Most communities asked first for permanent boreholes for clean daytime water, to end the night-time fetching that drives so much else. In Kroobay the emphasis fell instead on drainage, waste and flooding. Alongside this: solar lighting over water points, named repeatedly to protect women and girls collecting after dark; managed community latrines to stop open and sea toilet use; and road repairs to restore access cut off in the rains.
Reaching the people usually missed
Grafton’s leaders pressed for direct, house-to-house delivery of water and resources to disabled households, so that amputees and polio survivors are not forced to compete at the pump. Aberdeen’s leaders wanted economic alternatives aimed squarely at young women in survival sex work (skills training, grants and safety nets), and protection for female traders from the loss of their goods.
Earn trust before doing anything
In communities most let down before, leaders set conditions. Grafton’s asked that a project openly acknowledge the history of abandonment and make only short, guaranteed commitments rather than large promises. Several wanted work routed through respected traditional leaders rather than political channels, to avoid capture. A recurring theme was self-reliance with light external backing: communities organising their own youth taskforces to guard water points and maintain latrines.
How they want to be reached differs by place.Most communities favour meetings backed by local radio.The college population is the exception, preferring social media:a reminder that a single channel will not reach everyone.
On reachThe college is a
separate story.
Students at Fourah Bay College were surveyed alongside the communities but are not one. They live across different settings, and their profile is distinct. They share the water problem (it tops their list too) but very little else.
Figure 5 — problems named by FBC students against the marginalised communities. Each bubble totals the two groups (communities + students); click one to split it back into each group.
Health is their second problem, not drugs.
Poor healthcare lands at 35% for students, well above the communities at 22%. Drug abuse, unemployment, insecurity and GBV all fall away sharply once you leave the communities.
Their asks point to work and staying well.
Support follows the same logic as the communities, jobs and skills, but with health services close behind at 36% against 20%. A population that is housed and schooled, worried about staying well and finding work after study.
“For people to be healthy they need a good health facility.”
— FBC student
“We have tanks for storage but no water in them.”
— FBC campus resident (n=36)
“We are carrying bundles of water on our heads: there is no road for a motorcycle or car to enter.”
— FBC campus resident
People have stopped expecting outside help.
The written answers return again and again to one point: help has come before and not lasted. In Grafton this is sharpest, where an NGO resettled the community and then withdrew, leaving people to carry on alone. That memory now shapes what residents said would stop them trusting or using a new service.
- Cost: 253
- Lack of information: 199
- Trust: 114
- Distance: 111
- Time: 69
- Fear: 57
Figure 6 — barriers to using a new service, mentions across responses (n=476).
“This community was given relief by an NGO and was left to make developments themselves.”
Resident · Grafton
“Trust, because previous organizations have asked the same questions.”
Resident · Grafton
“People constantly come, take our information for data, disappear, and nothing ever changes.”
Leader · Grafton / Polio Community
The clearest warning in the data
A resident named the survey itself as grounds for distrust: other organisations asked the same questions and nothing followed. Anyone acting on this report should assume people are measuring them against a history of being left.
Who needs help, and how to reach them.
Asked who needs support most, most said everyone, youth next: a sign of how widely the strain is felt. To reach people, face-to-face contact is what they trust.
- Community meetings: 71%
- Social media: 37%
- Radio: 28%
- In-person centres: 24%
- Phone / WhatsApp: 16%
Figure 7 — preferred way to be reached, four communities (n=476).
The findings here stand on their own and are ready to act on. The fuller report still to come will add recorded interviews with a broader range of residents, deepening the picture and testing the leader proposals against what residents themselves say.
prefer community meetings, ahead of social media (37%), radio (28%) and in-person centres (24%). Phone and WhatsApp came last (16%). The college population is the exception, leaning to social media.
What the data says to do.
The evidence points two ways at once, and an honest reading holds both.
Water is the priority the communities themselves set, and it holds everywhere, students included.
It is largely a matter of public provision: wells, supply schedules, sanitation, access roads. The useful destination for that finding is the actors who can deliver it: city and water authorities, and WASH organisations.
The support people ask for is economic, and it is consistent across all four communities.
Skills training, jobs and small-business capital are wanted everywhere, most of all in Kroobay. This is where programmatic response is both possible and asked for.
Kroobay warrants focused attention.
Its problems are compounded and its demand for help is the broadest. Anyone choosing one place to start has a clear answer.
Disabled residents are being left out of even basic access.
In Grafton and the Polio community, amputees and polio survivors are pushed off water points and trapped by broken roads. Any water or aid effort there has to be designed to reach them directly, not assume they can compete for it.
Any future survey should list infrastructure as a support option.
People wrote it in unprompted; it should be measured directly, not inferred from a blank line.
Trust has to be earned before anything is built.
Communities let down before asked for honesty about past abandonment and small, kept commitments over large promises. Routing work through respected local figures rather than political channels was a recurring request.
The students are a separate audience with a separate need: water and health.
They should not be folded into community programming designed for different problems.
Whoever acts must plan to stay.
The strongest sentiment in the data is distrust born of organisations that left. A short pilot that ends without follow-through would confirm what residents already expect.
↳ A note on the water chain
Because water scarcity feeds directly into lost schooling, lost income and risk to girls, any intervention on those fronts that ignores water works against the current. The connections residents drew should sit at the centre of how solutions are designed.
Methodology & base
Prepared from field data collected by Christex Foundation, April 2026. Survey n = 609; community analysis n = 476 across Fourah Bay, Grafton, Kroobay and Aberdeen; FBC students n = 97; FBC campus residents n = 36. Leader discussions: four group conversations across Aberdeen, FBC, Grafton/Polio and Kroobay.
A preliminary report
Early findings
Field work: April 2026
christex.foundation · Built in Freetown