Business Model Innovation for Climate-Resilient Agriculture: A Pathway to Social Inclusion for Rural Communities in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Sierra Leone's rural economy sits at the confluence of acute climate vulnerability and structural poverty, with agriculture accounting for more than half of national output while remaining exposed to recurrent droughts, floods, and post-harvest losses. In October 2024, the Government of Sierra Leone, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) launched the Promotion of Climate Adaptation Technology and Business Model Innovations and Entrepreneurship (CATBIE) project to mobilise micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) as agents of climate adaptation in the water, agriculture, and energy sectors (UNIDO, 2024; GEF, 2024). This paper presents a qualitative, secondary-data case study of the CATBIE project and comparable interventions, examining how business model innovation is used to reconcile commercial viability with the social inclusion of women, youth, and smallholder farmers in Sierra Leone's rural communities. Drawing on the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010), the Base-of-the-Pyramid framework (Prahalad, 2005), and the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (DFID, 1999), together with the CGAP–IDH ABERA framework of business drivers for rural women's climate resilience (Sanford et al., 2025), the study synthesises evidence from UNIDO, GEF, FAO, CGAP, ILO, GIZ, and peer-reviewed sources published between 2021 and 2026. Findings indicate that Sierra Leonean MSMEs are innovating around integrated production-processing-marketing models, cold-chain and solar-powered pay-as-you-go technologies, and community-anchored delivery structures such as women's groups and youth cooperatives (FAO, 2026; UNIDO, 2025). These models advance social inclusion by intentionally embedding women's leadership, diversifying household income, and lowering the up-front cost of adaptation technologies, but their scale remains constrained by limited access to affordable finance, weak rural infrastructure, and thin technical and managerial capacity among early-stage enterprises. The enabling ecosystem comprising SMEDA, UNIDO's innovation platform, FAO's HASTEN incubation programme, and blended climate finance emerges as decisive in determining whether inclusion is a deliberate design feature or an incidental by-product of commercial expansion. The manuscript concludes with implications for refining the CATBIE project, for donor-funded MSME support programmes elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, and for theory linking inclusive business model design to climate resilience outcomes.