A teacher with more than two decades of experience, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree is reportedly earning just NLe2,500 a month in Sierra Leone.
The figure, cited by Sierra Leone Teachers’ Union (SLTU) President Mr. Ibrahim Bankapoma Kargbo, is a brutal illustration of the financial pressure facing educators in a country where the cost of food, transport and other essentials continues to squeeze household incomes.
The union says some teachers earn less than US$100 a month.
For teachers expected to educate the next generation, the gap between responsibility and reward is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.
Mr. Kargbo’s example is particularly striking because it is not about an inexperienced worker entering the profession. It concerns a teacher with more than 20 years of service and multiple academic qualifications.
At the same time, teachers are dealing with another problem: getting paid on time.
Salary payments can extend into the following month, leaving workers to cope with rent, food, transportation and family obligations without knowing when their wages will arrive.
For a low-paid worker, a delayed salary is not simply an administrative inconvenience. It can mean borrowing money to get to work, buying food on credit or falling behind on essential household expenses.
And the pressure is not confined to individual teachers.
Government-supported schools have also faced delays in receiving subsidies. In May 2026, the SLTU appealed to Vice-President Mohamed Juldeh Jalloh over unpaid school subsidies for the second and third terms of the 2025/26 academic year, warning that schools were struggling to maintain effective teaching and learning.
Sierra Leone’s own National Anti-Corruption Strategy recognises delays in school-fee subsidies and other school financing as a problem, setting timely payment as an objective for the institutions responsible for education funding.
The amount allocated to schools has also come under criticism.
Mr. Kargbo has called for the government’s school subsidy to increase tenfold, from NLe10 to NLe100 per child per term, arguing that the existing allocation is simply too small to provide meaningful support.
The result is a system under strain: teachers are fighting to survive on low and sometimes delayed incomes, while schools themselves are waiting for funds intended to support education.
Across the border in Liberia, the numbers tell a different story.
Liberia’s 2025 education salary structure put qualified C-certificate teachers at about US$185 a month, while teachers with bachelor’s-level qualifications eligible for junior and senior secondary teaching positions were placed at about US$400 a month. Liberia has also been working to regularise its public-school payroll, including bringing thousands of teachers’ salary payments up to date and planning to absorb additional qualified volunteer teachers into government employment.
The comparison is uncomfortable for Sierra Leone.
It is not simply about which country pays more. It raises a broader question about what governments are prepared to invest in the people responsible for delivering education.
Sierra Leone has announced measures aimed at easing pressure on public workers. A 20% salary increase for existing civil servants is due to take effect from September 2026, while the government has also announced plans to recruit 2,500 teachers and reassess or promote another 2,000.
Those measures matter, but they do not erase the concerns surrounding teachers who are already struggling with low wages, delayed payments and rising living costs.
Nor does increasing the number of teachers automatically solve the problem of retaining experienced and qualified educators.
A profession cannot be strengthened simply by putting more people into classrooms. Teachers must be paid predictably and sufficiently to remain in the profession and to perform their duties without being consumed by financial hardship.
The stakes extend far beyond teachers’ personal welfare.
When educators are underpaid, schools underfunded and subsidies delayed, the consequences can eventually reach the classroom: morale suffers, teaching becomes harder and the quality of education risks being compromised.
Sierra Leone has repeatedly placed education at the centre of its national development ambitions. But ambitious education policies require more than speeches, enrolment figures and new classrooms.
They require teachers who can afford to live.
A teacher should not spend the school day teaching children about the future while spending the evening wondering how to pay for food, transport or rent.
And a country that expects its teachers to prepare children for a better tomorrow must first confront the reality of the lives those teachers are living today.
The uncomfortable question is therefore no longer whether Sierra Leone needs better teachers.
It is whether Sierra Leone is prepared to pay, fund and treat them as the professionals it expects them to be.
