By Festus Poquie
A comprehensive 2024 Swedish expert evaluation of nearly two decades of cooperation with Liberia appears to have sharpened Stockholm’s rationale for phasing out bilateral development aid.
Sweden’s government in December, officially announced the aid freeze. The audit highlights fragmented programming, weak sustainability and signs of donor dependency that echo recent ministerial criticisms of long running aid relationships in Africa.
The Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA) report, consulted by the Oracle News Daily, finds a mixed legacy for Swedish support in Liberia. While Sweden helped sustain peacebuilding and seed important reforms, the evaluation concludes outcomes fell short of expectations in areas critical to breaking cycles of poverty and weak state capacity.
Sweden has been involved in Liberia since the 1960s and opened a permanent embassy in Monrovia in 2010. Between 2003 and 2021, Swedish assistance expanded steadily, and the embassy built a broad portfolio spanning governance, justice, gender, economic development and infrastructure.
The EBA evaluation credits Sweden with contributions to peace and democratic transition, some legal reforms (including the Land Rights Act) and influencing coordination among donors but stresses that, overall, progress has been limited relative to the scale and duration of support.
“Considering the amount of donor money spent and the time that has elapsed, overall progress has been more limited than anticipated,” the Report said.
“After the 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, there was a widespread notion among donors that Liberia could now serve as a textbook example of development. Yet, the poverty remains, and overall state capacity is low, as neither the government nor the donor community has been able to develop an effective approach to address it.
“In line with this trend, tangible and visible results from individual Swedish development cooperation projects have sometimes not been translated into overarching impacts.”
Key findings that informed policymakers
The EBA report identifies several structural weaknesses that undermine long-term impact:
– Strategic breadth over focus: Sweden’s strategies were deliberately wide, yielding flexibility but producing a fragmented portfolio in which projects sometimes operated in isolation rather than reinforcing each other.
– Weak links to citizen priorities: High-level institutional strengthening was prioritized even where basic services — notably education were less emphasized, which the report says limited tangible benefits for ordinary Liberians.
– Sustainability shortfalls: Infrastructure and capacity gains often lacked reliable government financing or staff retention plans, raising the risk that results would be reversed after donor exit.
– Risk of donor dependency: The evaluation warns that a high volume of aid, weak coordination and low absorptive capacity can foster dependence and reduce incentives for domestic reform.
“These are exactly the kinds of findings that make it easier for domestic political actors in donor countries to argue for sharper cuts or reprofiling of aid,” said one development analyst familiar with the EBA study.
“The report does not say aid has been useless, but it shows many missed opportunities.”
On Dec. 5 Sweden’s Development Aid Minister Benjamin Dousa announced plans to phase out bilateral aid to several countries, including Liberia, and to close development focused embassies.
Dousa framed the decision as part of a broader reallocation of resources to support Ukraine and criticized decades of scattered aid, saying “we have been like a water sprinkler” and that evaluation evidence, including prior studies on Tanzania, showed uneven or limited poverty impact.
The minister cited expert findings that in some cases longstanding aid may have reduced incentives for reform — an argument that resonates with the EBA’s caution about unrealistic feasibility assumptions and weak sustainability in some donor programs. Sweden’s government said the cutbacks will be phased and that some channels of support, including multilateral funding and targeted thematic work, may continue.
The EBA report itself strikes a balanced tone: it acknowledges notable Swedish contributions — especially in gender work and selected justice initiatives while urging a more focused, politically informed, and sustainability-oriented approach if bilateral engagement is to continue effectively.
Among its recommendations are tighter strategic focus, stronger sequencing of interventions, better monitoring, and an explicit effort to avoid exacerbating local inequalities or undermining land rights through poorly designed projects.
For Liberia the consequences are immediate and complex. Closing an embassy and winding down bilateral programs risks disrupting ongoing projects — from gender and community justice initiatives to feeder road maintenance and market systems work and could slow implementation of reforms that already struggle for domestic funding.
The EBA cautions that abrupt withdrawal without careful transition planning can reverse gains and exacerbate the very fragilities that aid sought to address.
Summary of the Report
The Long and Winding Road: Evaluation of Long-Term Development Cooperation between Liberia and Sweden 2003- 2021, EBA Report 2024:02, The Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA), Sweden.
Liberia is one of Sweden’s first development cooperation partner countries. As early as 1962, Sweden signed an agreement with Liberia regarding the construction of a school for vocational training, but during the civil cars (1989–1996, 1999–2003), Swedish development assistance, including humanitarian aid, was rather limited. Since 2003 Swedish official development assistance to Liberia has expanded almost yearly. The Swedish Embassy in Monrovia opened in 2010 and Sweden appointed an ambassador with full time presence in the country in 2013.
In this evaluation, Christoph Emminghaus and colleagues evaluate long term results, sustainability, relevance, coherence, and coordination of Sweden’s development cooperation with Liberia. The purpose is also to generate lessons to inform future cooperation. The evaluation spans the period 2003 until 2021, with stronger focus on the last ten years. We believe this report will be of use to Swedish policy makers, staff within the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at Sida and the Swedish Embassy in Liberia.
We also hope the report will be of relevance for other development actors working in Liberia or in other countries in post-conflict situations. The study has been conducted with support from a reference group chaired by Helena Lindholm, who previously served as chair of EBA. The authors are solely responsible for the content of the report. Stockholm, March 2024 Torbjörn Becker, EBA chair Helena Lindholm
Summary
In 2022, EBA commissioned this evaluation on the long-term development cooperation (DC) between Liberia and Sweden. The aim of this study was twofold:
1. To gain an in-depth understanding of the relevance, coherence, and long-term results of Swedish DC with Liberia (2003–2021)
2. To generate lessons to inform future Swedish DC with Liberia as well as with other partner countries. The evaluation focuses on Swedish DC in three thematic areas and under the main guiding strategies, one regional (2004–2006) and two bilateral (2008–2015, 2016–2020). The main findings of the evaluation are presented below. Formulating fitting strategies for Liberia The 2004 regional strategy, which launched the post-conflict engagement, focused on immediate reconstruction of basic services and post-war relief. Subsequent bilateral strategies were deliberately broad to address the many facets of Liberia’s development needs.
This breadth had its trade-offs. It allowed for high flexibility in implementation and the ability to respond to emerging challenges. However, it also resulted in a somewhat fragmented portfolio. The Embassy would have benefited from more specific guidance in a country context where nearly all development work is considered relevant. A broad portfolio risks reducing internal coherence and makes it more difficult to actively realise synergies between interventions.
Some projects tended to operate in isolation, limiting their potential for sustainable impact in a difficult context. The strategies prescribed a significant focus on overarching development and focussed strongly on institutions and state capabilities. For example, the Swedish strategies expected visible results in areas such as public service delivery, governance reform and democratic institutions. However, the strategic approach was not rooted in a more holistic analysis of state-society relations and political dynamics at play.
While the focus on institutional capabilities can have strong multiplier effects in other sectors and represents a high level of commitment, it posed an imbalance and did not ultimately provide a lot of tangible improvements for citizens. Swedish ambitions for state capacity building did not match Liberia’s long-term budgetary constraints and current absorptive capacity, even though Liberia’s resource mobilisation and capacity is identified as a risk factor for strategy implementation and sustainability of contributions.
Furthermore, the feasibility of achieving results in these areas without addressing more basic needs at the same time was not entirely plausible. For example, basic education can be seen as a necessary foundation for more advanced public service delivery (to enable citizens to participate, and to find suitable personnel for state institutions).
Education was a high priority in Liberia’s national development plans but has not been emphasised in Swedish strategies, although it often ranked highest among the issues facing the country and was also not significantly focussed on by other donors. This omission has been a point of contention between different stakeholders. In summary, while Sweden’s DC strategies have responded and evolved to Liberia’s changing landscape, their broad scope, and high ambitions present clear areas for improvement.
A more focused strategy with refined feasibility assumptions and political analysis could improve future cooperation and align both Swedish and Liberian priorities better. The overall strategy consultation processes should also have been more focused on aligning Sweden’s own funding priorities with Liberian needs and priorities. Crafting a relevant and coherent portfolio The Embassy successfully translated different strategies into a portfolio that respected the strategic guidelines and met the needs of both the government and Liberian citizens. Sweden has successfully mainstreamed a gender perspective in interventions and has included more marginalised groups in programming.
The portfolio shows a high degree of coherence within and between thematic areas over time, with notable exceptions. Several trends have affected the portfolio since 2003: The financial volume as well as the diversity in terms of sectors and implementing partners has steadily increased. The portfolio has shifted over time from a focus on post-conflict reconstruction of basic services and post-war relief to a more pronounced emphasis on general state building and reform, on economic development and more engagement with civil society.
The range of implementing partners has also changed, although there is a tendency to work with established partners: UN agencies and other international organisations have been Sweden’s main partners. However, their importance has declined over time as more diverse partners have become available. Overall, the portfolio is coherent within and across thematic areas. The Embassy has been particularly successful in several policy areas in creating groupings of projects that fit together well and are synergistic in their approach, particularly within Peace & Security and Democracy & Human Rights.
The individual projects in these coherent project clusters have been developed according to the Swedish strategies by embassy programming, but the clusters’ coherence emerged organically rather than strategic and could be further strengthened, as evidenced by the fact that no institutionalised links, coordination platforms or synergies for such clusters were established.
The embassy also has not always been entirely successful in finding the appropriate timing, fit, and sequencing of different engagements. In the case of the inclusive economic development engagement, projects appear to be somewhat more isolated.
The critique of the evaluation regarding the strategic guidance was also reflected in the well-operationalised portfolio, which therefore tended to focus on higher-level institutions at the expense of developing more tangible and local solutions, although several areas show a strong link from the local level all the way to the national, e.g. in market systems development or gender.
What was achieved in (almost) 20 years? The impact of Swedish cooperation with Liberia from 2003 to 2021 has been mixed. Liberia has moved from civil war to a relatively peaceful democracy, and there is good evidence that Sweden has contributed significantly to this development.
The peaceful elections of 2023 and the subsequent transfer of power for the presidency underline these developments. But, considering the amount of donor money spent and the time that has elapsed, overall progress has been more limited than anticipated: After the 2005 election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, there was a widespread notion among donors that Liberia could now serve as a textbook example of development. Yet, the poverty remains, and overall state capacity is low, as neither the government nor the donor community has been able to develop an effective approach to address it.
In line with this trend, tangible and visible results from individual Swedish development cooperation projects have sometimes not been translated into overarching impacts. In the area of conflict, peace and security, Liberia has not experienced a return to nationwide violent conflict, but its democratic, security and justice systems are not currently effective in ensuring the (local) rule of law. Access to justice and rule of law are marked by complex dynamics that negatively affect justice delivery. Nevertheless, the evaluation found that Sweden has made some important contributions to the security and justice system.
Whereas work with communities on formal and informal justice has been quite successful, institutional changes have been characterised by low sustainability of the capacity and infrastructure created, for example the establishment of regional security centres. A slightly more positive exception is the establishment of the so-called “Court E” for sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) cases, although here too, significant challenges remain for victims of SGBV to access justice. In democracy and human rights, Liberians prioritise democracy as form of government but have low trust in institutions and are affected by high corruption.
Sweden supported key government functions – ranging from elections to finance managements as well as key reforms in land rights and decentralisation. The latter can be considered as “high risk high reward” endeavours as they depend on various political dynamics to succeed. They reflect the overall institution-focussed state building approach prescribed in the strategic guidance. Both reforms have been passed into law, but implementation is slow and has yet to create more tangible impact on populations.
The Swedish approach on gender equality is exemplified by bottom-up engagements with communities in project-type funding, flanked by core support to UNFPA or UN Women, which has been very successful in contributing to changing discussions and dynamics around gender in Liberia. In inclusive economic development, the overall economic situation as perceived by the population has not improved significantly although a gradual improvement of many economic indicators must be noted.
Sweden has tried to promote inclusive economic development, for example by targeting feeder road infrastructure to connect rural populations to services and markets, and through various interventions to empower farmers, youth, and other groups to build businesses. A more recent development is market systems approaches, which look at entire value chains, such as cocoa, and aim to address market failures.
These approaches are more promising because of their holistic, systems-based approach, but they risk leaving behind the poorest people who are unable to participate in market systems due to financial, educational, or infrastructural constraints. Sweden also supported the rehabilitation of 900 km of feeder roads, but their long-term maintenance is not assured. The overall sustainability of project results was mixed: At the level of individual beneficiaries and in terms of changing norms, Swedish approaches have been successful, for example in terms of gender norms or staff capacity building.
At the institutional level, several challenges remain. The government’s inability to provide funds to maintain infrastructure and staff is a major obstacle to sustainable impact. Staff retention is low after donors have left a sector. There is often a risk that the results achieved will either stall or be reversed. Overall, the Swedish approach has started too late to consider sustainability more systematically and has struggled to move from relief and peacebuilding to longer-term development cooperation. Strategic aid coordination?
Coordination between donors and government is challenging, mainly because the Liberian government has little capacity and willingness to convene donors. In the absence of institutionalised exchanges, the quality of coordination has fluctuated over time as it is largely driven by individual agency rather than institutionalised processes. Liberia’s high aid dependency means the government is compelled to accept all projects, even if these don’t always coincide with the government’s main interests.
The multiplicity of modalities, priorities and interests of different donors adds to the complexity and overall paints a picture of incoherence due to lack of coordination and strategic management by the government. Donor coordination takes place largely through the Cooperating Partners Group (CPG). Sweden is seen as a driving force for more coordination and a more strategic dialogue between donors and the government and exerts a high amount of influence in Liberia.
Within the Swedish portfolio, the Embassy has become more and more appreciated for its supportive and accessible role in facilitating exchanges between implementing partners, especially after a permanent embassy was opened in 2010. The embassy however could be more proactive in promoting synergies between its own projects going forward. Lessons learned
• The impact of Swedish aid to Liberia between 2003 and 2021 has been mixed, contributing to peace and democratic transition, but with limited progress in breaking the cycle of poverty and weak state capacity. The impact on communities and individuals has been high where targeted.
• Sweden has a significant influence in Liberia, both through direct relations with the government and within the international donor community. This is partly due to its large contribution, over 1% of Liberia´s GDP annually, but also because Sweden is perceived as a constructive and reliable partner with a long-term commitment.
• Long-term engagement is crucial for achieving meaningful progress, especially in areas such as the rule of law, gender equality, decentralisation, and land reform. Many of the most important achievements (e.g. the Land Rights Act) are to a significant extent the result of decades of Swedish engagement.
• Although there is a high level of need in all sectors in Liberia, there was a missed opportunity for Sweden, but also other donors, to focus more on the education sector, which could have contributed to a greater overall impact and likely yielded more direct improvements for citizens.
• Unrealistic feasibility assumptions among donors, and a lack of focus on sustainability have hindered the long-term impact of cooperation between Liberia and its donors, including Sweden. • The focus on strengthening state institutions has resulted in limited and unsustainable capacity, while potentially missing opportunities to directly empower more communities. • Coherent grouping, planning, and implementation of related projects in individual policy areas can increase impact, suggesting the value of a more systematic approach to portfolio generation in future engagements. • For initiatives to be effective and sustainable, they must resonate with the actual needs and priorities of the target groups and institutions in Liberia. The overarching recommendations are to make the strategies more focused and to strengthen the guidance.
This could be done within thematic areas for coherent project clusters where the embassy then has freedom and guidance to develop an effective portfolio. These clusters represent different areas of activity and cooperation between Sweden and Liberia. Inclusive economic development for example could be more coherent and better aligned with the other thematic areas. There are also contradiction risks in the portfolio, especially between the area of environment and climate and economic development: On the one hand, Sweden wants to support the preservation of the natural environment and Liberia’s rainforests, while at the same time trying to professionalise the agricultural export industry, which is a major driver of deforestation in neighbouring countries, for example.
An explicit design of projects at the intersection of environment and economic growth – beyond mere pursuit of “sustainable agriculture” – can mitigate some of these risks. Likewise, Sweden should critically accompany Liberian developments which set large swaths of Liberian forest up for carbon offsets, with negative implication to land rights.2 Finally, Sweden should opt to critically analyse and then reinforce selected reform processes to ensure sustainable results and critically reflect on whether and how additional reforms can be supported more effectively.
Recommendations for the Embassy include adopting a more strategic approach to portfolio building and better facilitating exchange and synergies between projects implemented by different partners. In addition, the Embassy should aim to adopt strategies that allow for quicker identification of ineffective practices (“fail 2Recently Liberia was set to concede 10% of its territory to Emirati company Blue Carbon for carbon credit production (https://www.ft.com/content/f9bead69-7401-44fe-8db9-1c4063ae958c ). faster”), thus enabling faster learning for better impact. This could be achieved by improving initial baselines and monitoring, conducting (sub)portfolio, or on-going evaluations, and incorporating targeted research. In moving towards more systemic and market-based approaches, the inclusive approach of Swedish engagement should remain fundamental and leave no one behind. Civil society engagement should continue, but with caution against the risk of creating donor dependency.
Finally, it remains paramount for Swedish development cooperation in Liberia to maintain a vigilant and mindful approach that recognises the complex dynamics that shape Liberia’s socio-political landscape. This includes recognising centre-periphery tensions, rural-urban disparities, socio-economic inequalities, and the critical role of the youth population. Tailoring interventions to avoid inadvertently exacerbating existing tensions and disparities and to actively address some of these root causes of poverty and conflict will continue to be key to sustainable development in the country.
