Our Story
Built from the market we work in.
Connoisseur Consults Sierra Leone was founded by Mahawa Kamara, who came to this work from social work in the UK, which is a stranger route into business consultancy than it sounds. Social work teaches you to look underneath the presenting problem. That habit turned out to be the whole job. She returned to Sierra Leone in October and started doing the obvious thing that almost nobody does: going into businesses and finding out what was actually happening inside them. Hundreds of conversations later, the same pattern kept appearing. Businesses with real potential, real effort and often real capital, quietly failing for reasons nobody was naming. That fieldwork became Systems For Informal Wealth, our operating framework, and it is the reason we say what we say. We are not importing McKinsey's playbook. We built our own, from the realities of the market we operate in, because African businesses deserve frameworks built from African operating realities. We work across agro-processing, automotive, telecoms, professional services and the social sector. We have restructured businesses, built inventory and financial systems from nothing, and led one company as interim managing director for six months. We publish original research through the Freetown Business Briefing.
You cannot digitise chaos. Structure before scale. Always.
〰️
You cannot digitise chaos. Structure before scale. Always. 〰️
Our Philosophy: Structure Before Scale. We focus on three primary pillars to unlock enterprise growth:
Informal Wealth Systems (SFIW): Helping cash-heavy founders transition from a "hustle" mindset to a structured enterprise. We move businesses from "I don't know where the money is going" to total financial visibility and control.
Enterprise Structure: Professionalising SMEs through internal controls, reporting clarity, and decision-making systems—without overcomplicating the work.
Institutional Advisory: Bridging the gap between policy and practice. We partner with NGOs and donor programs to help them understand real business behaviour through on-the-ground enterprise diagnostics and research
Our engagements are practical, phased, and deeply contextual:
1. Diagnostic Conversation: We seek to understand how money, stock, and decisions currently move.
2. System Design: We design simple systems tailored to how the business actually operates—not just on paper.
3. Implementation Support: We prioritise clarity, usability, and sustainability over complexity
How We Work
Whether you are a local founder in Freetown or a diaspora-led business building from afar, we partner with you as hands-on strategists. We build businesses that are not just surviving, but are ready to scale from grassroots to global
Meet the Architect
Mahawa Kamara is a Private Sector Development Specialist, Ecosystem Builder, and the Founder of Connoisseur Consults. With over a decade of experience bridging UK diaspora capital and West African informal markets, she is a leading voice on ensuring that regional economic growth is grounded in solid, offline operational infrastructure.
Mahawa does not just theorise about the informal economy—she builds the systems that formalise it. Having bootstrapped her own product brand, The Soap Connoisseur, and facilitated structural training for World Bank-backed initiatives, she understands the realities of grassroots enterprise. Most recently serving as Interim Managing Director for Corporate Connect Sierra Leone, she successfully led company-wide restructuring and operational reform from the inside out.
Today, she scales that systems-thinking to the macroeconomic level as the Lead Architect of the Diaspora Capital & Business Forum (DCBF), structuring the multi-billion dollar capital flows between the global diaspora and local Sierra Leonean markets..
Mahawa champions clarity, structure, and ownership for women-led ventures and diaspora entrepreneurs building in Africa. For her, this work sits at the intersection of spirit and truth: building with conviction and building with standards. She believes nation-building is highly practical. It is systems, governance, and love made visible.