Abdulai Fasineh Dumbuya
The Ministry of Communications, Technology and Innovation, in collaboration with the Ministry of Youth, is set to bring together 500 young and emerging innovators from the provinces to participate in the 2024 Sierra Leone Innovates Tech Summit in Freetown.
Salima Bah made the statement on 28th May 2024, whilst updating the media on the public expectations of the summit, during the Government’s Weekly Press Conference organized by the Ministry of Information and Civic Education held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Conference hall.
She mentioned targeting schools, innovation centres and universities in the provinces to scout young talents for the three day Tech Summit from 11th to 13th June next month.
She said the government’s agenda for innovation is to create a platform for young and emerging innovators to showcase their potentials in both national and international platforms, saying that they are also important to the government in terms of proffering workable solutions that will promote growth and foster national development.
Bah said that young people have solutions to many of the challenges in the country and that the Tech Summit will serve as a platform to discover young and emerging talents across Sierra Leone.
She said the world over is competing in writing successes of innovation in agriculture, while abandoning the traditional labour intensive approach. She said mining and transport are also crucial for innovation investment, more especially if the young talents see innovation as a solution to their problems.
“The ideals and inspirations of young talents can turn into a huge business idea for the government and themselves. We want to empower the minds of young people to see innovation as an especially useful field to be explored and gain numerous benefits,” she said.
She expressed delight for staging the Tech Summit which will bring together young innovators, and create the platform for the young people to showcase their potential through innovation skills. She said that lack of the requisite information can destroy viable skills that can benefit the young innovators and the country.
Conversations around business and finding an ideal solution to change their lives and livelihoods, she said, is crucial to the summit because of the many instances the world over in which young persons find sustainable solutions for themselves as well as for the age-long problems of their countries.
“We have an agriculture innovation challenge and it is the flagship programme of President Bio, so we are calling innovators to help us find the solution to feed Sierra Leone. It is ideal to help them who, in turn, can help build the economy through their ideas,” she said.
She recognized how a good number of young talents are doing remarkable things in different walks of life and said that it is really important to have relevant conversations particularly around how they can help such individuals to exponentially explore the global space and emerge with greater things.
She noted that the summit will capture key players, such as the Director of Facebook’s Public Policy and some innovation capitalists who, according to the minister, will be speaking at the summit from informed and transformative experiences, highlighting the financial successes of their innovations to the young innovators in Sierra Leone.
“People with the requisite knowledge around the world will orient our young innovators about how they can raise their own finances through innovation so that they cannot depend on the government for everything,” she said.
She said experts will be present to help change the narratives of content creators from being commentators to viable media users, in view of the fact that content creation is a big business in the global arena with a global market value of over $200 billion. “This is what the market will generate from the content creation field every year globally,” she said.
She expressed the urgency to have conversation around regulatory reforms so that laws can be created to support young talents to be able to make their ideas known to the public without any barrier.
Copyright © 2024 Politico (31/05/24)
