December 1, 2021
BY: MOHAMED SAHR
Principles for Digital Development has hosted training workshop to showcase Sierra Leone’s commitment to global standards on Tuesday 30th November, 2021 at Golden Tulip hotel in Freetown.
Following the October 2021 validation of Sierra Leone’s National Digital Development Policy, it is a strategic document that aligns with the government’s 2019-2023 Medium-Term National Development Plan to build a digital economy and leverage Information Communication Technology (ICT) to stimulate growth as well streamline knowledge and solutions to the implementers of the government’s digital initiatives across all sectors.
Mohamed Jalloh, Director of Communication at Ministry of Information and Communication welcomed delegates from different countries and Digital Impact Alliance for embracing the workshop and for seeing it as a thing of success.
He disclosed that the event serves as an opportunity especially when the future of Sierra Leone digital transformation is on a designing edge.
“I think this is an opportune time for partners to actually support Sierra Leone to ensure that we are able to develop systems that would meet international benchmarks. As you all know Sierra Leone is not an isolated country, we are part of the global village, so we want to ensure we fit into the global digital economy. That is why we welcome this kind of support to our system development,’’ he said.
Bashiru Coomber, Deputy Permanent Secretary at Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) noted that the MIC and Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) had been extremely working hard to secure an enterprise of government architecture digital.
“This workshop is part of series of capacity building that has been organized by the Ministry of Information and Communication and DIAL for critical players in the digital ecosystem of the Government of Sierra Leone. The aim of this workshop is to ensure that ICT professions possess the requisite skills for effective implementation of digital initiatives,’’ he said.
Dr. Ransford Mensah, Country Lead at Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) averred that the focus of the training is to see how DIAL can actualize the National Data Development Policy and the National Data Development Strategy which were validated in recent weeks.
He added that these are the two valid documents for the government to create an enabling environment for digitalization.
He revealed that this particularly training aims to view the principles of digital development and to further amass a digital framework.
Dr. Mensah noted that the benefit of the workshop is to make sure government and senior practitioners have the same level of thoughts in terms of data driven and also ensure that the existing resource is leveraged.
“for the fact the President of the Republic of Sierra Leone, His Excellency President Julius Maada Bio is really pushing for a digital economy, now that we are having series of senior IT practitioners from various MDAs going through this training, what we really going to do for them is to own the implementation part of these roadmaps and to find a way of putting things into context in various Ministries Departments and Agencies so that they would have one government,’’ he said.
Claudine Lim, Manager, Principles for Digital Development revealed that the key principles are designing with the users to better understand citizens needs and how to deliver them which is has as well addressed privacy and security of data.
She affirmed that the main principles in the training are structuring collaborations across all MDAs through understanding and maintaining resources in different areas of work.
‘‘The training is evergreen and there is certainly room for seeing the work the government has done in the enterprise architecture,’’ she said.
Telli Koroma, Chief Technology Officer at Ministry of Information and Communication felt pleased to be part of the training and he believe through this workshop he would easily streamline the things he had learnt as well as share date between all MDAs through service delivery.
Jacqueline Njeri, from IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited which is housed in Kenya maintained that the training is helpful especially in their line of work as it would be of use to the practitioners in the different MDAs and Digital Architecture Development areas. She thanked the facilitators and assured that what she had learnt it would be of benefit to her institution.