“We are all in”: Sierra Leone's open-source journey at the UN General Assembly

In September 2026, during the high-level week of the UN General Assembly, our founder and Principal Consultant, Tamba Sheku Lamin, spoke at a side event on Sierra Leone’s open-source journey. He spoke on behalf of Sierra Leoneans in Technology (SLinT), the diaspora technology community of which he is a co-founder, former president and, as the Ministry’s post describes him, a current board member. Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation (MoCTI) reported the remarks under a three-word headline: “We are all in.”

What was said

As the Ministry reported it, the message was a commitment from the diaspora to the country’s digital public goods programme:

• Sierra Leone’s tech diaspora includes people who have deployed open-source systems used by millions, and they are ready to share what that takes.
• That experience is feeding into Sierra Leone’s digital public goods pipeline, so that what Sierra Leone builds can also be adopted by other African countries.
• The Government has opened the door. The diaspora’s side of the bargain is knowledge transfer, a continuing partnership with the Ministry, and giving back.

Why it matters

Sierra Leone has made open source a matter of national policy. In November 2025 the Ministry validated the country’s first open-source software policy for the public sector, which makes open-source tools the default for government digital infrastructure in order to lower costs, reduce vendor lock-in and build systems suited to national needs.

A policy needs people who can deploy, secure and maintain what it calls for. That is the gap the diaspora commitment addresses, and it is the gap our research works on. Our programme on digital public goods for education in West Africa asks what makes a platform adoptable by a ministry or university that cannot pay recurring licence fees, how open platforms should be designed for intermittent connectivity and mobile-first users, and what it takes for a national system to meet the Digital Public Goods Standard and stay maintained.

The questions come from delivery, not theory. Our founder’s record in Sierra Leone includes the Sierra Leone Learning Passport, with the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation, UNICEF and the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education, reaching 50,000+ students; and SLOEDP, Sierra Leone’s first open election data platform, adopted by the Independent Media Commission and hosted at Njala University. The full record is on the past-performance page.

What we are doing next

We publish our tools under open licences, teach the engineering teams who have to run them, and work with ministries, universities and development partners that are building digital public goods. If you are working on Sierra Leone’s open-source agenda, or a similar one elsewhere in Africa, we would like to hear from you: email tamba@tambalamin.me with the subject line “Research collaboration”.