BY Ishmael Dumbuya
Smart Africa Digital Academy, SADA, has yesterday, 4th April 2023, officially launched it national digital academy and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Information and Communications at the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Tower Hill, in order to boost digital skills on the African Continent.
The launch of SADA in Sierra Leone follows launches in other countries including Rwanda, Ghana, Congo, Sierra Leone and the creation and rollout of this initiative across the continent come against the backdrop of an immense gap in digital skills amid an ever- evolving digital world.
In his submission to the MOU and launch, the Chief Executive Officer and Director General of SADA, Lacina Kone’, said that SADA is a direct response to digital skills shortage with which Sierra Leone and Africa in general are confronted.
He added that they are extremely pleased to implement SADA in Sierra Leone and advance the nation digital skills, in close collaboration with the government of Sierra Leone through the Information Ministry.
He went on to state that SADA will be an essential backing to the country’s digital sector strategy, which is to transform Sierra Leone into West Africa’s digital services platform through the means including human resources with the necessary capacities to drive the country’s development, noting that SADA in Sierra Leone will encompass a range of initiatives such as advanced trainings in ICT through a training of trainer approach, executive training and teacher’s skills.
The Minister of Information and Communications, Abdul Rahman Swarray, said SADA is an instrument that will allow the country to take new initiatives that have already been taken by Sierra Leone within the framework of its action program and to open perspectives in other areas of cooperation and capacity building.
“This MOU signature is for me, a very important step to scale up.” he said.
He explained that SADA aims to improve digital skills qualifications, and employability, and meet the emerging talent needs of African citizens.
He said the national digital academy will support the uniquely identified digital skills priority needs at the national level and that SADA is embarking on two programs to provide digital skills for African youth, entrepreneurs, and citizens in general, for them to thrive in the global technology ecosystem.
“The SADA for youth and entrepreneur will help increase digital technology competence, reduce unemployment and increase the digital entrepreneurship capabilities for youth in Africa; while the SADA Digital Literacy will help all African citizens to be digitally literate.”
Solomon Jamiru, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications stated that since 2019, SADA started its operations in Sierra Leone, focusing on capacity building for decision makers.
“SADA has trained about 3,000 policy and decision makers across 26 countries in trending digital transformation and emerging technology- related topics including Artificial Intelligence Use Cases, Digital Economy, Data Protection and Privacy Rural Broadband Policies, Security Technologies, Regulatory and Innovative Sandboxing environments, Data Centres and Cloud,” he said.
