By Politico Staff Writer
Sierra Leone's President, Julius Maada Bio, will today launch a national vision to digitize the way his government manages its resources and how citizens receive services.
The National Digital and Innovation Strategy (NIDS), developed by the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation (DSTI), is in line with the president’s priority of human capital development.
The launching coincides with the first anniversary this week of the DSTI, which provided the technical know-how for the plan which also represents the country’s road map in moving from analog to digital over the next 3 to 10 years.
According to a media release from the DSTI, through the PR firm VRC Marketing, the foundation for digitization under NIDS comes after eight months of consultation with government and civil society leaders, donors, international actors, and citizens. It notes that a delegation from Sierra Leone also took a learning tour to Estonia, recognized global leaders for state-led digitization and e-governance.
"What I have learned in engagement with innovators, and technologists from MIT, TED and here within the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation is that if we are open to exploring new ideas, and innovatively doing things, we not only gain a better understanding of our development challenges but we also solve the problems affecting our people," President Bio is quoted in a statement.
Sierra Leone has a population of 7 million, with 57% living in poverty. Out of 188 countries, it is ranked 184 on the United Nations 2018 Human Development Index. Other countries with the same GDP per capita rank better on the HCD Index. The country's medium-term development plan notes that public service delivery does not meet the population's basic needs and developing human capital.
Over 55% of households in Sierra Leone own a mobile phone, and it is this fact that makes digitization plausible. Citizens can already access a DSTI Integrated
Geographical Information System (iGIS) to retrieve information about public service infrastructure. With the iGIS Portal, citizens can use Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) to send an SMS to the short code *468# to locate government services -‘find my nearest school,' 'hospital,' or 'local court,' saving time and in cases of emergency facilitating life-saving interventions.
Sierra Leone is embracing digitization so that no citizen gets left behind. It hopes to have every national own a digital ID. All government employees, ministries, departments and agencies, and national assets will also be digitized. Banking and financial services will also be digitized - the latter already underway as of last August when Sierra Leone became the first country to deploy blockchain digital ID platform to make financial services accessible to the unbanked.
With NIDS, the government will better understand when, how, and where to provide services, and more importantly, which services will deliver the most impact towards the HCD.
For the vision to become a reality, the government's leaders must embrace the change, said Chief Innovation Officer, Dr David Moinina Sengeh.
One government agency already leading the way is Statistics SL - the agency that collects, stores, and analyzes demographic data to inform decision making. NIDS enables researchers at Stats SL to launch a Comprehensive Health and Epidemiological Surveillance System (CHESS) - a longitudinal study that will follow participants throughout their life. CHESS relies on e-ID to link data from health facilities to community - level information.
"We struggled to create the electronic identification system in other countries like Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, India and Vietnam where we implemented CHESS for research," said
Sierra Leone's Statistician-General, Professor Osman Sankoh, aotherwise known as Mallam O, a global expert on development research and data for decision making.
Sierra Leone's government aims to be fully underway on its digitization journey by 2023. Over five million citizens already have a digital ID that unlocks with their thumbprint. DSTI has developed a fleet management system that tracks and manages government vehicles to stop the kind of loss that occurred in 2018 when thousands of cars belonging to the state went missing.
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