Welcoming Sierra Leone’s OpenGov Fellows — catalysts and enablers of the Open Data movement in Sierra Leone
It gives me immense excitement to announce that we finally have the first cohort of the Sierra Leone Open Government Fellows on-board! After months of a strenuous application process, under which we interviewed some of Salone’s most outstanding change makers in the civic tech space, (followed by a few more months of unavoidable delays!), we are finally ready and roaring to kickstart the fellowship program.
In partnership with Code for Africa and the World Bank, the Sierra Leone Open Government Fellowship program aims to provide outstanding change makers the skills, tools and resources necessary to assist the Sierra Leone government adopt tech tools to become more engaging with its citizens.
The fellows will be directly working with the StoryLab Academy, an ongoing collaboration between Code for Africa, Google News Lab and the World Bank to help partner media build advanced data journalism projects. They would be conducting one newsroom-based workshop in Freetown per month for a minimum of 25 participants at each training. The workshop content will be informed by the host newsroom’s needs, with lessons based on the Academy’s courseware. The Fellows would be offerring ongoing virtual support and mentorship to workshop participants, to help them use their new skills or tools in demonstration projects. Because data use cuts across more than just media, these trainings will be provided to a minimum of 3 government ministries and civic society organizations.
Finally, each fellow would produce a total of 6 data journalism stories over the course of the fellowship. These stories would either be produced in direct collaboration with a specific government ministry or agency, or on the Fellow’s own initiative. The aim of the data journalism story is to use the open data published by the Government of Sierra Leone in innovative ways to showcase the insights that the civic society and government can gain by applying data journalism tools to them.
Without further ado, here are our amazing fellows!
Dr Yakama Jones
Dr Yakama Manty Jones is an expert in Development Economics, Finance and International Business. She is the Delivery Team Lead on Sierra Leone’s President’s Delivery Team having already served as the Information Management and Quality Assurance Specialist and Data Management Specialist. She is also the Team Leader for the Policy pathway of the Masters of Research in Public Policy, a collaborative Master’s Program between the University of Sierra Leone and the Partnership for African Social and Governance Research. Dr Jones is also a lecturer in Economics and Finance at the Department of Economics, Fourah Bay College.
Yakama has published a working papers on economic growth, foreign aid and foreign direct investment in West Africa and her unpublished thesis is on ‘Debt Overhang and Natural Resources: Re-visiting the Resource Cure Hypothesis’ with an in-depth focus on Sierra Leone. She is also has a few publications underway.
She is also the Founder of the Yak Jones Foundation, aimed at bringing back the reading culture to Sierra Leone and promoting literacy.
Fanta Marie Tonkara
Fanta has a passion for Public Health and making a change in the lives of others. She has a Bachelors Degree in Health Administration and Policy with a Minor in Sociology from The University of Maryland Baltimore County, and recently completed a MPH program from the Oxford Brookes University. Born and raised in the United States, Fanta moved back to Sierra Leone in early 2015, when she started working with Save the Children International during the Ebola crisis, reaching communities along the peninsula and monitoring Peripheral Health Units on Infection Prevention and Control. She is currently working with Save the Children International as a Health Project Officer.
Fanta is always on the lookout for the next big challenge.She has aspirations for starting her own organisation that focuses on mental health and well being of the children in Sierra Leone. Fanta’s hobbies include travelling, reading, and volunteering.
Alhaji Abu Komeh
Alhaji has a Masters in Economics from the University of Birmingham, and a Masters in Public Policy and Human Development from the United Nations University. He has worked with a diverse range of government and non-governmental organisations over a span of ten years. During the Ebola crisis, Alhaji supported the rolling out of Christian Aid’s emergency response. Currently, he is working at the President’s Recovery Priorities Delivery Team as a Data Analyst and Finance Tracking Support to the Office of National Security’s Response on the August 14th Flooding and Mudslide.
Alhaji has a strong passion to contributing towards the development of Sierra Leone and the renaissance of its youths. He is particularly interested in supporting initiatives which aim to strengthen public and macroeconomic policies, poverty alleviation programmes, and wider participation of citizens in governance.
About Open Gov Fellowships
The Sierra Leone Open Government Fellowship is based on a continental initiative of the Code for Africa (CfAfrica) federation, first launched in 2015 where fellows helped liberate data or build better digital democracies in Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda. The Open Government Fellowships are intended to support African government’s Open Government Partnership pledge to make important ‘civic’ information available online.
This Open Government Fellowship follows Code for Sierra Leone’s first d|Bootcamp in Freetown, based on a Code for Africa model first pioneered in Kenya in 2012 that has since been adopted across the world, with 32 bootcamps hosted in 27 countries. The Freetown event follows Code for Africa’s earlier pioneering work in Sierra Leone, where it partnered with the World Bank to help kickstart data scraperthons (where we liberate data by digitising ‘deadwood’ information) during a 6-week Open Data Festival 2016 in March 2016. You can read about the scraperthons here.
The d|Bootcamp projects were incubated by Code for Sierra Leone, with support from iDT Labs.
The World Bank’s Governance Global Practice (GGP) supports client countries to help them build capable, efficient, open, inclusive, and accountable institutions. This is critical for countries to underpin sustainable growth and is at the heart of the World Bank’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
Code for Africa is the continent’s largest federation of civic technology and open data laboratories, with affiliate members in 10 African countries and funded projects in a further 12 countries. CfAfrica manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as openAFRICA.net and GotToVote.cc.
