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Sierra Leone MDAS win DSTI innovation grant

By Mabinty M. Kamara

The Directorate of Science and Technology (DSTI) in Sierra Leone has on Friday 18th June 2021 awarded 80,000 dollars to three Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) as funds to digitize their operations.

The three MDAs, the Office of the Administrator and Registrar General (OARG) and the National Public Procurement Authority (NPPA) each received 30,000 dollars whilst the National Revenue Authority (NRA) got 20,000 dollars, all geared towards supporting the completion of their various projects pitched in line with digitizing their operations for effective service delivery.

The pitch night, hosted at the Radisson Blu hotel in Freetown, brought forward six competing institutions; NRA, the National Minerals Agency (NMA), NPPA, OARG, Ministry of Transport and Aviation, and the Teaching Service Commission, all having identified problems in their institutions that needed to be solved.

These proposals presented according to officials were developed during a two-week intensive boot camp designed by DISTI in collaboration with MIT government Lab (MITGOVLAB)    with a Methodology that would enable the staff of those MDAS to apply an innovative approach to solving challenges and spark a culture of governance innovation within their teams.

Delivering the Keynote address, the Chief Innovator of DSTI who doubles as the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary School, Dr. David Moinina Sengeh said the Directorate was established with two things in mind, one of which was to support the government develop and implement its National Development Plan which he said has several clusters.  

He said governance innovation is at the core of citizen’s engagement and that the objective of the government is to provide services for all citizens across or wherever they are “and that informed our national innovation and digital strategy which talks about digitization for all. It explicitly speaks about digital governance, digital identity, and digital; economy and we saw that among the presentations, we had today, they all touched on one of those core principles. The second thing that DSTI has been able to do is the focus on ecosystem mapping and strengthening,” he said.

He noted that it was good that government  institutions in the country can engage and see that the problems they are solving are similar and that the tools that they are using can be shared amongst each other .“If we saw the solutions, either it was what NPPA was doing or the NRA, they are all linked in terms of the data structures that lay behind these systems and there is a need for us as government officials to share data, to share contents to share architectures, principle, and solutions to achieving the national development goals through science technology and Innovation”, the Minister noted.  

 He said the grant awarded to the winning MDAS is not a small amount and urged them to put the money behind the ideas they presented, for its success. He encouraged those who could not get the grant to work on their ideas presented.  

Copyright © 2021 Politico Online (21/06/21)

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