Six students, one weekend, one vehicle and a plan made in a WhatsApp group: the arithmetic goes wrong in the same place every time. Not on the way there, but on the third day, when somebody has run out of money and everyone else has to decide whether that is their problem. The fix is not to spend less. It is to know which numbers you can look up and which you have to agree out loud before anyone leaves.
In Sierra Leone there is exactly one travel cost with an official, published, nationally uniform price, and it is fuel. The National Petroleum Regulatory Authority sets the pump price for the whole country in a pricing regime, publishes the current one and archives every regime that came before it. The price at a station in Koidu is the price at a station in Freetown, it is a single look-up on the regulator's own site, and it is the only line in your budget nobody can argue with. Every other cost in the trip is a negotiation.
Funding the trip is its own exercise, and one worth starting weeks earlier than most groups do. I am Beezy is one of the ways a student builds a share in small daily amounts instead of asking for the whole of it three days before departure — slower, and far less awkward.
Why is fuel the only number you can look up?
Because it is administered. The regulator sets the pump price for the whole country, revises it and archives the previous regimes, which means you can verify it, budget against it and check it again the week you leave.
Uniform nationally, revised regularly
Prices are set for the country as a whole rather than by station or by region, so the seven licensed marketing companies compete on where their stations are and whether the pump has stock, never on price. For a group planning a route, that has a useful consequence: you do not need to guess whether fuel is dearer in the provinces, and you do not need to build in a margin for it.
The regime does change, and it changes often enough to matter. Regimes are issued through the year and each one supersedes the last, so the figure to put in your budget is the one on the regulator's page in the week you travel, not the one a friend remembers from the last trip. Take the per-litre price for the fuel your vehicle actually burns, note the date of the regime alongside it, and the whole group can check your arithmetic in thirty seconds.
Two things that surprise first-time planners
Diesel costs more than petrol here, which reverses the assumption most people bring from elsewhere and matters a great deal if the vehicle you have been offered is a diesel one. And kerosene — the fuel poorer households cook and light with — sits at the expensive end of the list rather than the cheap end, which is worth knowing if anyone is buying it for a stay in the provinces. Neither fact changes your route. Both change the conversation with whoever owns the vehicle.
Who sells it, and why that is not a price question
Seven licensed marketing companies share the market, led by NP SL, Conex, Aminata & Sons and ZALA Petroleum, with LeonOil, ECO Energy and Malador behind them. Since the regulator fixes the price, none of them competes on it. What they compete on is where the stations are and whether the pump has stock, and on a long provincial route that is the difference that will actually affect your day.
The four costs you have to agree before you leave
None of these has a published figure in Sierra Leone. That is not a reason to leave them vague — it is the reason to fix them by agreement instead, in the group, before anybody boards anything.
Local transport and the crossing to Lungi
Poda-poda and keke fares are not published by any authority, and neither is the crossing of the estuary that separates Freetown from Lungi airport. If your trip involves anyone flying in or out, that crossing is a distinct leg with its own cost and its own timing, and treating it as part of "getting to town" is how groups miss flights. Ask locally, agree a figure per person, and put it in the shared budget as a line of its own.
Inside Freetown, name the stations you will actually use — Lumley, Wilberforce, Hill Station — rather than describing distances. Everyone in the group can then price their own leg, which is faster than one person trying to price six.
Beds, food and the contingency
No accommodation rates and no restaurant prices are published nationally. What is published is the direction of travel: the restaurants and hotels category of the consumer price index rose 17.77 per cent over the twelve months to June 2026, and transport rose 40.23 per cent over the same period. So a price a friend quotes you from last year is not a guide, and the contingency line in a Sierra Leonean group budget should be larger than it would be elsewhere.
So the budget separates cleanly into two kinds of line: one you look up, four you agree. Put them in a single shared table before departure and the trip stops producing surprises.
| Cost | Officially published? | How to fix it before you leave |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel | Yes, by the petroleum regulator, uniform nationwide | Look up the current regime the week you travel |
| Poda-poda and keke fares | No | Ask locally, then agree a per-person figure |
| Estuary crossing to Lungi | No | Budget it as its own leg, with its own timing |
| Accommodation | No | Confirm directly with the place, in writing |
| Food | No | Set a daily per-person cap the group signs up to |
Does the district you choose change the budget?
More than any other decision you will make. Sierra Leone does not have one rate of inflation, it has five, and the gap between the highest and the lowest is wide enough to be the deciding factor in where a student group goes.
The five regional rates, and what they mean for a weekend
In June 2026 the twelve-month inflation rate was 21.38 per cent in the Western Area, which is Freetown and its surroundings, against 2.51 per cent in the North-West. The Northern region stood at 16.29 per cent, the Eastern at 8.74 per cent and the Southern at 8.48 per cent, for a national average of 14.77 per cent. The Western Area alone accounts for 46.4 per cent of the national basket, which is why the national figure sits so close to the Freetown one.
Translate that into a plan. A group whose costs are mostly incurred in Freetown is living inside the fastest-rising prices in the country. A group heading north-west is not. That does not make one trip better than the other, but it does mean the same budget stretches very differently depending on where it is spent, and last year's figures are a much worse guide in Freetown than they are elsewhere.
Where the people actually are
Route planning is easier when the population map is right, and the common version of it is not. At the 2021 census Freetown City had 609,174 residents, Kenema 255,110, Bo 223,075, Koidu 196,418 and Makeni 85,116 — so Kenema is the second city, Koidu is more than twice the size of Makeni, and the rank order most people recite is wrong. Waterloo, which is not a city council at all, had 314,382 residents and is the second-largest concentration of people in the country.
| Region | Twelve-month inflation, June 2026 | Share of the national basket |
|---|---|---|
| Western Area (Freetown) | 21.38% | 46.4% |
| Northern | 16.29% | 13.0% |
| Eastern | 8.74% | 15.6% |
| Southern | 8.48% | 12.7% |
| North-West | 2.51% | 12.3% |
Funding a student share with I am Beezy
The person who cannot pay their share on day one is usually the person who was asked three days before departure. Starting earlier is the whole trick, and it needs something that pays in small amounts on a regular rhythm rather than in one lump.
How the earnings work
Explain I am Beezy once, to everyone, so nobody has to ask twice. Videos, articles and advertisements are viewed inside the app, each view is credited, and the total settles onto whatever payment method the person already uses. The published reference band is 5 to 15 euros a day, which at 26.3086 new leones to the euro — the Bank of Sierra Leone reference rate on 5 August 2026 — comes out somewhere between about NLe 132 and NLe 395 a day. Recheck the rate before it goes into a shared budget.
Set the target from the fuel line first
Because fuel is the only cost you can calculate exactly, calculate it first, divide it by the number of travellers, and make that the individual target. It is a real number, everyone can verify it, and nobody argues about a figure published by a regulator.
Keep the money where you can see it
Have each person hold their own share on their own wallet, on a SIM registered in their own name, rather than pooling it early with one member of the group. Mobile money reached 117,419 agents across the country at the end of December 2025, up from 67,149 a year earlier, so cashing out close to wherever you are going is far more realistic than it was even a year ago.
Questions groups argue about
Who pays for the driver's fuel on the way back empty?
Decide it before departure and write it in the group chat. A return leg with nobody in the vehicle is still fuel burnt on your trip, and the argument only happens when it was never named. Price it with the published litre price and it stops being a matter of opinion.
What if somebody drops out the week before?
Agree the rule in advance: either the fixed costs are split by whoever actually travels, or a deposit is non-refundable inside a set window. Both are fair. Neither is fair if it is decided after the person has dropped out.
Is it cheaper to travel in the provinces?
The published inflation figures say prices are rising far more slowly outside the Western Area, and fuel costs the same everywhere. What nobody publishes is the level of accommodation and food prices in either place, so treat the inflation gap as a signal about which budget will hold, not as a promise about which trip is cheaper.
The version of this that works
Build the budget in two halves. In the first, put the fuel, calculated from the current regime at the published price per litre and divided by the number of travellers — that half is verifiable and nobody will dispute it. In the second, put local transport, the Lungi crossing if it applies, beds and food, each agreed as a figure in the group chat before anyone leaves, with a contingency sized for a country where transport prices rose more than 40 per cent in a year. Choose the destination knowing that the same money behaves very differently in the Western Area than in the North-West. And start building your share weeks ahead rather than days: joining I am Beezy costs nothing, and what it pays accumulates quietly on the wallet in your pocket.
