Sierra Leone is counting on the government's recent approval of a long-awaited draft Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy to spur technology development in the country.
Minister of Information and Communication Ibrahim Ben Kargbo said the policy formalizes ideas to help Sierra Leone achieve a 60 percent teledensity -- a key requirement in the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for economic development in emerging markets.
The first draft of the national ICT policy, approved two weeks ago and prepared by the Sierra Leone chapter of the Internet Society ISOC-SL, was presented to President Ernest Koroma for consideration in January 2008. Its completion was, however, dependent on the consultative approach of the National ICT Task Force (NICTTF), which conducted a 2009 e-readiness survey and reviewed the draft policy over a two-day national workshop of stakeholders before a final copy was completed and submitted in May.
Giving an overview of ICT development in the country, the policy states that "despite the growth of mobile telephones, Sierra Leone is still ranked as one of the least connected countries (170th out of 178 economies) on the Digital Access Index (DAI) (with an index of 0.10), which measures the overall ability of citizens to access and use ICTs."
The policy also cited challenges for the ICT sector in Sierra Leone.
"One of the biggest constraints to the expansion of the telecommunications infrastructure in Sierra Leone (outside of the capital and a few main cities), is the limited extent of the electricity grid, which has yet to reach many of the provincial areas," it says. "These areas typically lack electricity or fixed phone service and are completely unconnected with the rest of the country."
Other constraints include the provision of Internet bandwidth, which is limited, expensive and largely unavailable even in the big cities, and the public telephone network, which is largely circuit-switched as opposed to packet-switched and relies heavily on copper wire rather than fiber optics.
In a related development, Kargbo mentioned that the secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Hamadoun Touré, has agreed to help Sierra Leone be a test-case country for the One Laptop Per Child Project, originally organized at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but now independent. The OLPC has developed a low-cost laptop, the XO, for distribution in developing countries.
Five schools will be identified in the first phase of this program, which will target about 10,000 children, Kargbo said.
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