Effect of Civil War on Sierra Leone

744 Words3 Pages
To what extent has the Sierra Leone civil war impacted the Life expectancy and GDP per capita. Sierra Leone was in a very brutal war from the years 1991-2002. Known as one of the most brutal wars in Africa, where over 50’000 died and 10’000 brutality injured (had their arm, leg, ear, nose etc… cut off for torture), made the country fall into one of its darkest moments in history falling into 177 place in the HDI ranking. During the war they became one of the lowest HDI in the whole world with a score of 0.2 under the average HDI score in Sub-Saharan Africa and 0.4 below the world average. It has succeeded to recover from this but is still under the average Sub-Saharan African score. In this essay, I will be looking at three of the factors that have been most affected by the war and therefore made such a low score in the HDI. These are going to be GDP per capita, Life expectancy and how badly the HDI was affected. How has the Sierra Leone civil war affected the GDP per capita? Sierra Leone was supposed to be a luxury place for the rich and should have made everybody rich because of its big diamond mines. With diamonds alone, Sierra Leone makes over 300 million US dollars. However most of these diamonds have been sold as blood diamonds (sold illegally during the war). By this, there was a man Jamil Sahid Mohamed, who thanks to this technique was able to become one of the richest men in Africa. He is renowned as the king of blood diamonds. This shows that because of this war, the money has not ended up going to the right people and many people have therefore gotten very poor while others very rich. As you can see in source 1, since the war has started, the GDP per capita has just been going down by a lot. It has succeeded to recover, by the end of the war but it is still not at the level it was. There are also other reasons to the GDP per Capita going down and those
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