15/09/2026
Centrist Bai Gbala writes: Liberia's Billion-Dollar Budget: Turning Fiscal Growth into Jobs and Opportunity
By Cllr. Kanio Bai Gbala
Assistant Professor of Law, Louis Arthur Grimes School of Law, University of Liberia
Executive Chairperson, The Centrism Movement
■ From a Fiscal Milestone to an Employment Opportunity
Liberia's movement toward a national budget of approximately US$1 billion is an important fiscal milestone, reflecting stronger domestic revenue mobilization and a growing capacity of Government to address national development needs. The administration of President Joseph Nyuma Boakai deserves recognition for this progress. The larger policy question is how this fiscal space translates into improvements ordinary Liberians can see and feel, particularly jobs and incomes for young people. World Bank analysis suggests that every dollar invested in agribusiness generates more jobs than equivalent spending in manufacturing or services, and the region's experience with public works and SME financing offers concrete lessons for how fiscal growth becomes shared prosperity. Four areas offer the strongest prospects for short-term impact: agriculture and agro-processing, employment-intensive infrastructure, technical and vocational skills and apprenticeships, and SMEs and light manufacturing. Our national conversation should move beyond the size of the budget to how many jobs it creates, businesses it grows, young people it equips with employable skills, and imports it enables Liberia to produce locally.
■ Agriculture and Infrastructure: Put Young Liberians to Work
Agriculture should sit at the center of this employment strategy, with emphasis shifting from subsistence farming toward commercial production, processing, and value chains. This is not a marginal sector for Liberia: the 2024 national agriculture census found that more than 68 percent of Liberia's population is engaged in agriculture, yet the sector contributes only about 28.5 percent of GDP, a gap that points directly to how much value is currently lost between the farm gate and the market. Rice, cassava, vegetables, poultry, cocoa, and oil palm can generate employment beyond the farm through transportation, storage, processing, packaging, and marketing. Rice illustrates the opportunity starkly: of the roughly 809,000 tonnes of rice Liberia consumes annually, only about 21 percent is produced locally, meaning the great majority of our staple food, and the jobs embedded in growing, milling, and moving it, is currently exported to farmers and processors abroad. Government could, for example, establish an integrated rice production and processing cluster in a high-potential county, providing irrigation, machinery-hire services, storage, and milling facilities, while Liberian businesses handle transportation, packaging, and distribution. Infrastructure spending can reinforce the same strategy. South Africa's Expanded Public Works Programme, one of the continent's longest-running examples, has generated around 14 million work opportunities over two decades, a reminder that sustained, well-designed public works can move real numbers of people into paid work over time. A national youth public works initiative could engage young people and Liberian contractors in feeder-road rehabilitation, drainage, sanitation, and routine road maintenance. A US$10 million feeder-road maintenance program across several counties, for instance, could require contractors to recruit and train local young people as equipment operators, masons, mechanics, and road-maintenance workers, creating jobs, building skills, and improving farmers' access to markets simultaneously.
■ Skills, SMEs, and Government Purchasing Power
Liberia must also strengthen the bridge between education and employment. Universities remain indispensable, but the economy equally needs electricians, plumbers, welders, mechanics, heavy-equipment operators, refrigeration and solar technicians, agricultural technicians, and ICT specialists. Government could expand TVET and establish a national apprenticeship program under which young Liberians spend six to twelve months working with contractors, farms, workshops, telecommunications companies, and other businesses, with Government sharing part of the training or stipend cost. At the same time, increased fiscal space should help viable Liberian SMEs move from survival enterprises into employers. The stakes are significant regionally: Sub-Saharan Africa's roughly 44 million micro, small, and medium enterprises already provide an estimated 80 percent of jobs across the continent, yet more than half of them cannot access the financing they need to grow, a constraint Liberian producers face acutely. Instead of importing all furniture, uniforms, processed foods, and similar supplies required by public institutions, for example, Government procurement could, where quality, price, and capacity permit, deliberately increase opportunities for qualified Liberian producers and connect them to professionally managed credit facilities. A furniture workshop employing five people today could employ twenty tomorrow with access to equipment, affordable finance, and predictable markets. This is how Government can use its purchasing power to stimulate private employment without unnecessarily expanding the public payroll.
■ Measure Jobs and Results, Not Only Expenditure
Government could consider establishing a clearly identifiable Productive Investment and Jobs Envelope within the national budget, concentrating perhaps US$200 to 250 million over time across these four areas, subject to fiscal sustainability and other national priorities. The precise amount matters less than the principle: a meaningful portion of Liberia's growing fiscal capacity should be deliberately tied to productive investment and measurable employment outcomes. Government should publish simple indicators showing jobs created, apprentices placed, SMEs financed, kilometers of productive roads completed, agricultural output increased, private investment leveraged, and supported businesses surviving after twelve or twenty-four months. This would help shift our national measure of success from how much Government spends to what that spending produces.
Reaching the billion-dollar threshold is worth recognizing; converting that milestone into farms, factories, skills, businesses, roads, and sustainable jobs would be even more consequential. As Liberia's budget grows, our productive economy must grow with it. The billion-dollar budget should ultimately become a billion-dollar opportunity for Liberia's young people.
