Life Behind the Cart in Sierra Leone’s Informal Sector

On any given day, through the dusty or muddy streets of Shell New Road, Freetown, you’ll find Hassan Sesay, 43, pushing his heavy cart, navigating potholes and broken roads, hustling to deliver goods that don’t even belong to him but upon which his entire livelihood depends. Sesay was born along Lunsar Road in Makeni to a builder father and a trader mother. Life was hard. His parents could not afford to send him to school, and his childhood dream of...