Making Change Happen in Sierra Leone
The country’s Chief Minister, David Moinina Sengeh, speaks to international governance expert Alvin Pang about the challenges of delivering universal education, Sierra Leone’s groundbreaking “Radical Inclusion” policy, and what government and start-ups have in common.
Alvin Pang: You were appointed Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education in 2019. What was the governance environment for education in Sierra Leone at the time and how did you approach your role?
David Moinina Sengeh: When I took office, there was already a strong policy direction for education. The Government had been working to implement tuition-free, high-quality school education for about a year and a half. This was based on President Julius Maada Bio’s vision for education, which was all about developing the future human capital of Sierra Leone. When I came on board, the department had already begun implementing various processes and reforms so we already had some sense of what worked and what did not. My initial challenge was showing that we could continue the progress we had made towards realising this policy.
A big question was whether we would be able to engage with teachers, deal with teaching strikes, and fight corruption in the system, which were all significant concerns. At the same time, I had to manage and marshal my staff in order to carry out our plans to address these issues. I saw all these problems I had to solve as actually being very similar. My approach is to bring different people to the table and discuss the challenges as they are, in a very honest and direct way. Shying away from them does not help and it just makes things more difficult.
I sat down with the teachers and told them that I was putting all my cards on the table. In that way, they were aware that I was not coming from the point of view of trying to use them, but that we all had the same goal, which was to improve their welfare.
In a resource-constrained environment, spending on education may not be the first consideration for many countries. Yet the Government of Sierra Leone has committed at least 20% of its annual budget to education since 2018. What was your approach to making education a governance top priority?
In Sierra Leone, we think of education as an investment. The President understands that we cannot have national development without improving our human capital, and that the best way to enhance our human capital is through education. At the highest levels, we understand that education is the best investment that we can make in our children’s futures. We do this by covering their tuition fees, paying the examination transaction fees, building schools for them, buying textbooks for them, investing in the curriculum, and so on.
Once we determined as a government that education would be a flagship programme, it was then my duty to communicate that to everyone. So if my colleagues were to make budget comparisons with education, I would emphasise that it was a national priority for us as a government. It was important for us to express this as an investment, not an expense, and that this was something that would benefit everyone, with cost savings and greater opportunities in the future. And we have been prepared to work with everyone: market women, bike riders, any stakeholder who has an interest in their children’s future.
Under your charge, the Ministry initiated a national policy of “Radical Inclusion” to ensure no one is left behind in education. What are the key tenets of this policy, and what steps did you take to realise this ambitious vision?
Radical Inclusion is a policy that says we stop at nothing until everyone can access education and then transition out of school. For instance, we focus on young women learners, pregnant girls, kids with disabilities, those who are poor, those who are from remote areas – anyone who has been left out of education for structural, physical, or legal reasons. We believe that education for all means all. And that means it is important to develop a policy that reaches out to the most vulnerable. When you build systems with the most vulnerable in mind, those improvements actually create something that works better for all students. Everybody benefits; that is what Radical Inclusion can do.
Radical Inclusion is a policy that says we stop at nothing until everyone can access education and then transition out of school.
To bring this about, we made it a point to engage with people; we went to meet them on the streets and in mosques and churches. We spoke to parents in their homes, and in town halls. We engaged with teachers through the radio, newspapers, and television. We went everywhere to ensure we got people to buy in to this cultural shift.
One strategy was that we helped people to see that our policies would not change their traditions much. To do this, we gave them examples of how being accommodating in other areas had not fundamentally disrupted their social fabric as they had feared. This is how we were able to get our citizens to understand our intentions and come on board with us.
One policy approach that worked was to tell people stories of success. For instance, we told the stories of girls who were pregnant mothers and who came back to school and thrived. We also sought out local champions. Once we were able to convince a few local tribal chiefs, they were the ones who began to give their own positive stories of transformation, and they became advocates of change within their community. We were then able to refer people to their local leaders for reassurance.
Introducing Radical Inclusion was not the biggest challenge. We may think that it is impossible to make a difference with broad impact, but that is not true. Once we began to explain the policy, and people overcame their initial fears, they bought into it and started to support it.
For me, it was also easy because the President became the biggest champion of Radical Inclusion. Its success actually created an incentive to be affiliated with the policy. If, for example, the Energy Minister were to speak about an issue of energy reform, or the Agriculture Minister wanted to drive a new technology, suddenly they were choosing to frame the benefits of these policies around how they help to deliver Radical Inclusion. I am really pleased that Radical Inclusion has become associated with governance success and a beacon of hope for all of us.
After implementing free education at the primary and secondary levels across the country, Sierra Leone has seen a dramatic increase in school enrolment rates. However, these have brought fresh challenges for education delivery. How have you addressed these implementation concerns?
All great progress and innovation will involve gaps. What we have in Sierra Leone is essentially a national-scale experiment into what happens when we change an important policy so rapidly and invest 20% of our budget in doing so. We are creating solutions to address our needs by developing the technology, the programmes, and the curriculum to realise our goals. Because it is a big experiment, there will always be detractors who are going to push back. Some of these may be school officials or teachers who are doing things against our laws, such as carrying out corporal punishment or taking school fees when they should not. We have mitigated this by investing in a toll-free line where people can call in to lodge a complaint and we will take action. We also provide other avenues for people to reach out to us if they have concerns.
One of the major challenges has been capacity. When you have policies such as free education for everybody, you get a lot more children into schools, and that leads to overcrowding because it is difficult to build classrooms as quickly as you add students. Sometimes the students share textbooks. Classrooms and textbooks can be expensive capital investments.
Nevertheless, we have provided more than 10 million textbooks to students and teachers as well as working to address the capacity issue by offering access through other means. We have digitised textbooks and made sure that pupils have access to radio or mobile phone-based solutions. To further support people, we were able to waive the charge that children used to have to pay to check their examination results, which was expensive and time-consuming.
Meanwhile, we have worked to solve the basic capacity problem by building as many classrooms as possible. Our partners have built around 1,000 classrooms over the last five years, which has at least eased that space burden.
You have also served as the Government’s Chief Innovation Officer. Prior to that you worked in the private sector and completed a PhD focused on designing prosthetic limbs. What have your past experiences taught you about innovation and experimentation in the public sector?
I think about my work as a transition. When I was studying at Harvard in the U.S., I founded an NGO to distribute mosquito nets in my village and to give laptops to children – and that was a real struggle. One issue we faced was that children tend to sleep on the floor and so we had to distribute a type of net that would still work for them.
Later I went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, after that, to work for IBM. That was when I began to work on improving prosthetic limbs, coming up with new technology to address some of the issues amputees and others faced. All the different areas of my work, including what I do now in government, are connected. At their heart, they are all about providing services for people who need them.
Innovation in the public sector is what leadership is about. Developing a patent to solve a problem is the same as designing public policy to solve a problem. It is all linked, whether you are creating technologies that address human augmentation or helping to code software that allows people to check their examination results. In that sense, I find life in the public and private sectors to be similar. We are also optimising for customers, formulating policies customised for citizens.
One difference is that in government we want to make sure citizens all receive services cost-effectively, with the same kind of fluidity and experience that high-paying customers enjoy in the private sector. To give an example: we created an SMS-based solution to deliver school results that anybody anywhere can use. Everyone in Sierra Leone has an SMS-enabled mobile phone, even though they may not all have mobile apps. Whether you are wealthy or poor, from a private school or from a public school, the SMS idea provided the same solution to solve the same fundamental problem. That simple innovation really demonstrated the power of technology to people.
In July 2023, you were appointed as Chief Minister of Sierra Leone. As one of your country’s most senior leaders, what is the most important lesson you have learnt about being in government?
I am very excited to be Chief Minister, which is really the technical implementing arm of the Office of the President. It is very important that a national leader, in our case our President, has people around them who can drive change, design and implement policy, and ultimately help to ensure that their plans to improve the lives of the people come to fruition.
I am excited about driving the President’s agenda, which involves the Big Five priorities: feeding the country; human capital investments – ensuring that young people are learning the appropriate skills; youth employment and job creation; public sector reform in service delivery; and technology infrastructure. This is how we are going to transform the country.
Ultimately, we cannot change society without focusing on why we do the work that we do. It is service. Public service is why leaders are in government. Government is not there to do something outside of the public service. Public service and the public sector are about reform. About change. That is the most important step for me.
The Seven Principles of Radical Inclusion
by David Moinina Sengeh
Public services exist to serve all who need and are entitled to receive them. Without an inclusive approach, key segments of the population risk missing out on help and support. Time and again, those groups that do fall through the cracks are those that are the most vulnerable and in greatest need of the services in question.
Inclusivity is becoming ever more important as citizens’ expectations of the quality of public services and the accountability of leaders grow. Achieving an inclusive approach is challenging. It must be addressed during every phase of policymaking, from policy design to implementation and delivery, and even monitoring and evaluation.
However, the rewards for institutions and leaders that achieve it are great. Inclusive societies tend to demonstrate higher trust, greater unity, and improved resilience in the face of crises. Here are my seven key steps to achieving Radical Inclusion and unlocking its many benefits:
You cannot promote an agenda of inclusion if you do not identify, name, and recognise all the ways in which people are excluded, as well as the associated impacts and costs of that exclusion. You must define your terms precisely if you are to see the opportunities that exist for solving the problem.
You have to listen to understand how everyone, including the perpetrators, the advocates, the victims, and the silent observers feel; how they are impacted by and how they benefit from exclusion in society. Only then can you begin to build a case for Radical Inclusion that works for everyone. Oftentimes, the ones you disagree with the most are the ones you should listen to the most attentively.
You must define the role of all actors – active and silent – both those who are fighting to maintain the status quo, and those who are working to change it. And you must look unblinkingly at yourself. What is it about you and the situation at this time and this location that make it possible for change to occur?
You cannot change systems that are rooted in history and culture by yourself. For radical shifts to occur, you need to identify and mobilise a critical mass of allies. You need as many people and institutions to work and fight beside you as you can find.
Taking action is the most direct way to enable inclusion. In fact, it is the only way; silent advocacy is not an option. You must make a commitment to take the sustained actions that are needed to remove the exclusion you
have identified.
Because change is new, it can be difficult. To make the inclusion permanent, everyone – both the previous excluder and the newly included – needs a framework to respond to, accept, and be a part of the “new normal”.
Once the previously identified exclusion has been eliminated and the new normal established, the best way to solidify it is to immediately identify the next exclusion that needs to be addressed, whether in your home, school, community, nation, or the world at large. We must always be working toward a more just society by identifying new areas of exclusion and dismantling them through Radical Inclusion.
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