The Eastern Province () is one of the four provinces of

Sierra Leone Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country on the southwest coast of West Africa. It is bordered to the southeast by Liberia and by Guinea to the north. Sierra Leone's land area is . It has a tropical climate and envi ...

. It covers an area of 15,676 km² and has a population of 1,641,012 (2015

census A census (from Latin ''censere'', 'to assess') is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording, and calculating population information about the members of a given Statistical population, population, usually displayed in the form of stati ...

). Its capital and administrative centre is

Kenema Based on the 2021 national mid-term census, Kenema has a population of 255,110. making it the second most populous city in Sierra Leone after Freetown, and the largest city in the country's Eastern Province, Sierra Leone, Eastern Province. Kenema ...

. Eastern Province, the centre of the country's diamond mining industry, is very mountainous and has two ranges, the Gola Hills and the Loma Mountains.

Economy

The Eastern Province is the heart of

diamond Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Diamond is tasteless, odourless, strong, brittle solid, colourless in pure form, a poor conductor of e ...

mining activity. The precious stone was first discovered in around the 1930s, and has played a major part in the region's history ever since. Most diamonds are mined and exported by small local enterprises, numbering around 200,000 to 300,000; some of these are illegal, while many are officially sanctioned. Additionally, there are a handful of foreign countries carrying out larger scale diamond mining.

Geography

The Eastern Province borders the

Nzérékoré Region The Nzérékoré Region () is one of the eight administrative regions of Guinea. Spread across an area of , its capital and largest city is Nzérékoré. Located in the south-west corner of the country, it is bordered by the countries of Sierra ...

Guinea Guinea, officially the Republic of Guinea, is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the west, Guinea-Bissau to the northwest, Senegal to the north, Mali to the northeast, Côte d'Ivoire to the southeast, and Sier ...

to the northeast, the

Liberia Liberia, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast–Lib ...

n counties of Lofa, Gbarpolu and

Grand Cape Mount Grand Cape Mount is a county in the northwestern portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that constitute the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has five districts. Robertsport serves as the capital ...

to the east and south, and the Sierra Leonian Southern and Northern provinces to the west and northwest. Eastern Province is the only region of Sierra Leone without any shoreline. The province is home to the Gola Hills, a tract of

rainforest Rainforests are forests characterized by a closed and continuous tree Canopy (biology), canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforests can be generally classified as tropi ...

with fauna including

chimpanzee The chimpanzee (; ''Pan troglodytes''), also simply known as the chimp, is a species of Hominidae, great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close rel ...

s, western red colobus, many endemic species of

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class (biology), class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the Oviparity, laying of Eggshell, hard-shelled eggs, a high Metabolism, metabolic rate, a fou ...

, and a sparse population of

pygmy hippopotamus The pygmy hippopotamus or pygmy hippo (''Choeropsis liberiensis'') is a small Hippopotamidae, hippopotamid which is native to the forests and swamps of West Africa, primarily in Liberia, with small populations in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Ivory Co ...

. The other main area of wilderness is the Loma Mountains, which lie mostly in the Northern Province, but also extend into the northern part of the Eastern Province.

Districts

The province is divided into 3 districts. They are: Kailahun District, based around the city of Kailahun; Kenema District, which is headquartered by the provincial capital

Economy

Geography

Districts

Religion

See also

References

Cited works

External links