Vickie Remoe Institute of Digital Communications

Meet Sierra Leone’s Essential Workers: The Electricity Sales Agent

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I am a 42-year-old electricity sales agent. I sell top-up electricity credit, and I earn a commission from the number of sales per day. They don’t pay me a salary. I make a one percent commission from every sale I make. Before the pandemic, I made a profit on sales. I had a high customer inflow. In a day I could sell 10 million Leones make SLL 100, 000 commission. People don’t buy light like they used to. Sales are down. I work the same number of hours, but I only make SLL 30,000 in commission because I sell SLL 3 million since COVID-19.

I have to take from my daily earnings to pay transport every day to come here. I can’t quit now. There is nothing else to do. The sales go up at the end of every month, that’s when people come to top-up for electricity. Sometimes, I make mistakes with this machine, which causes me to lose money; when I do, it’s hard to recover.

I am married, and I have four children. I am the breadwinner of the home; my husband lost his job some while ago. All my children are going to school, my eldest son is in Milton Margai College, the two other girls are in senior secondary school, and the younger one is in primary school. For the eldest son, I am getting help from my brother to pay his fees, and the others their burden is upon me.

Credit: Essential Stories/OSIWA

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