★ About Liberia Ledger Monrovia · remote Established 2026

A public record first. A research practice on top of it.

We read Liberia's budget documents in full, reconcile every table to the dollar, and publish the result with its page numbers. Then we answer harder questions for people who need them answered.

Liberia Ledger was started by two researchers with a shared frustration: the numbers that decide Liberia's public services exist only inside five-hundred-page PDFs that no one reconciles, that contradict each other, and that quietly disappear from government websites. The database on this site is our answer. It is free to read and built to be checked.

WHAT WE DO

Five ways to use the work, from free to commissioned

The open layer is the credibility engine and stays free. Everything that is faster, finer or bespoke has a price. Prices are on request.

01 · OPEN

The public site

Every chart, every table under it, every source receipt, the free sample report and the discrepancy log — free to read, check and cite. The summary-grain tables are available on request under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Free · attribution to Liberia Ledger and the source document
No charge
02 · BRIEFING

One question, answered with pages

A short, sourced answer to a specific question — a sector's execution history, an agency's trajectory, what a supplementary budget changes, the fiscal room behind a promise. Delivered in days, with the tables it rests on.

Newsrooms, embassies, NGOs, investors, legislators' offices
Fixed fee per brief · on request
03 · MONITOR

The standing subscription

Each new outturn report and budget book, read in full and turned into a note within days of publication — delivered with the updated tables and a quarterly call.

Development partners, banks, analysts, editors
Annual · on request
04 · DATA LICENCE

The fine grain, for organisations

The full agency, county and line-item tables behind the explorer and the county map — every year, every split, every line — as clean CSVs with every update, commercial reuse rights, and a named contact who will stand behind any figure.

Consultancies, DFIs, research institutes, data teams
Annual · on request
05 · COMMISSIONED

Due diligence and reconstruction

Scoped projects: fiscal due diligence on a public entity, exposure to donor withdrawal, or a county-level reconstruction of where a sector's money goes, built from payroll, facility registers and project lists.

Funders, lenders, contractors, decentralisation programmes
Scoped · proposal on request

How we work

PRINCIPLES

Five rules govern what reaches the database and what reaches this site. They are the reason a figure here can be checked against the document it came from rather than taken on trust.

  • Every number has a page. Each figure in the database carries a document id, a page number and the archived file's checksum. If we cannot cite it, we do not publish it.
  • We store what the document printed. When two sources disagree, both rows exist and the disagreement is logged. We never silently choose, net, rescale or "correct" a government figure.
  • Derived numbers stay derived. Execution rates, variances and annualised figures are always shown as calculations from the printed figures, never presented as figures in their own right.
  • Nothing publishes without a person. Every figure used in a headline claim or a paid report is checked back to its page by a person before it goes out.
  • The archive is append-only. Government sites lose documents; we do not. One budget volume in the archive was missing from the ministry's site when we went looking for it.
200
official documents in the archive, each with a checksum
40,521
rows in the dataset, every one carrying its page
2,133
six-digit line items from the FY2024 book alone
22
errors found in the documents, published rather than corrected

Why not a global firm?

THE HONEST ANSWER

Large consultancies and multilateral databases are good at what they do. They are not built for this. Their Liberia coverage is a country page in a global template, refreshed annually, sourced to summary tables, and priced for a ministry's budget rather than a newsroom's.

The World Bank's Liberia Public Finance Review, launched in Monrovia on 7 September 2026, is the best analysis of Liberian public finance published this year, and we recommend it. It is also a PDF that appears once, argues a case, and cites its evidence to institutions rather than to pages. A reader who wants to check a figure in it, update it next quarter, or ask it a question it was not written to answer has nowhere to go. That is the gap this database fills — not a rival argument, but the layer underneath one.

  • Depth over breadth. One country, every document, every line item. We know that the FY2024 book carries an unlabelled twelfth sector and that three consecutive volumes relabel the same historical columns. A template does not.
  • Checkable, not just credible. Every figure here resolves to a document id, a page and a checksum. Where an institution has published the same number twice with different values, both are stored and the difference is named.
  • Speed. A sourced briefing in days, because the database already exists.
  • A public track record. A full sample report, our shorter findings and the errors we find in the documents are published here for anyone to check. Judge the work, then hire it.
  • Local presence. A partner in Monrovia who can request, collect and verify documents that never reach the internet.

Talk to us

A briefing, a Monitor subscription, a data licence, a scoped project, or a question about a number on this site: write to info@liberialedger.com.

Email us