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Sierra Leone suffered a devastating civil war between 1991 and 2002 and an Ebola virus disease outbreak in 2014/15. During the war many people, many of them young, fled the conflict by heading to the city for protection. As a result, Sierra Leone is experiencing a post-conflict and post-epidemic economic and demographic recovery. The country shows evidence of economic growth, electoral stabilisation and improving human development indicators. These indicators include school enrolment, which grew 115 per cent in 2016, and life expectancy at birth, which increased from 35 years in the middle of the war to 51 years in 2016 (World Bank, 2018). The population was seven million in the 2015 census (up from five million recorded in the 2004 census), of whom 80 per cent were under 35 years of age and 41 per cent under 15 years (Statistics Sierra Leone, 2017). Considerable challenges remain.