FEATURED

National Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Sierra Leone: Driving Policy through DigitA’s ATR Framework

April 09, 2026 6 Minutes Read

Sierra Leone is one of Africa's youngest populations, with a rapidly expanding mobile connectivity base. The country holds significant potential as a regional hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. Yet, translating that potential into an investable and inclusive ecosystem requires a policy architecture grounded in evidence, shaped by stakeholders, and built for implementation. DigitA partnered with the Government of Sierra Leone, under the leadership of the Ministry of Communications Technology and Innovation, to develop the country's first National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Policy. The engagement spanned ecosystem diagnosis, stakeholder consultation, policy design, and the production of a cabinet-ready policy paper, positioning Sierra Leone to formally commit to a long-term innovation and entrepreneurship agenda aligned with its Medium Term National Development Plan 2024-2030.

The Opportunity

Despite its compelling fundamentals, Sierra Leone's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem lacked the institutional scaffolding necessary to attract investment, scale startups, and retain talent.

The country's Medium Term National Development Plan 2024–2030 designates Technology as a national game changer, creating both the mandate and the political will to develop such a framework. However, designing a credible policy required confronting the ecosystem's real structural challenges: burdensome regulatory requirements, a fragmented talent development pipeline, inadequate physical and digital infrastructure, limited access to capital, and weak public-private coordination.

DigitA identified the need for a policy framework that was not simply aspirational, but one that also matched the ambitions of Sierra Leone's leadership with the realities faced daily by its entrepreneurs.

The Approach

DigitA led the design and development of the National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Policy through an integrated process that combined ecosystem diagnostics, multi-stakeholder consultation, and comparative policy benchmarking.

The process began with a structured National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Policy Workshop that brought together entrepreneurs, private sector actors, government agencies, and development stakeholders. Rather than starting from theoretical frameworks, the workshop surfaced the lived experiences of ecosystem participants, mapping pain points across regulation, taxation, infrastructure, talent, and investment.

From the workshop findings, DigitA structured the policy architecture around six mutually reinforcing pillars:

Policy and Regulatory Development
Talent and Entrepreneurship Development
Infrastructure, Investment Stimulation and Promotion
Ease of Doing Business Operational Reforms
Service Support

DigitA benchmarked the framework against successful models across Africa and beyond, drawing on Tunisia's Startup Act, Rwanda's Kigali Innovation City, Nigeria's Startup Act 2022, Kenya's Data Protection Act, Estonia's e-Residency program, and the UK's FCA regulatory sandbox, among others. These references were adapted to Sierra Leone's specific economic context, sectoral strengths, and institutional capacity.

Underpinning the entire framework is the "Attract, Thrive, Retain" (ATR) strategy a model that maps each pillar's outputs to one of three ecosystem outcomes: attracting investment and talent, enabling businesses and innovators to thrive, and retaining human capital and enterprise within the ecosystem over the long term. The ATR logic applies beyond Sierra Leone. Every emerging ecosystem in Africa faces the same challenge: attract capital and talent, create conditions for businesses to survive, and retain what it builds. Most policy frameworks address one of these. ATR addresses all three, making it a replicable organising model for any African government at the early stages of ecosystem design.

Key Findings

The ecosystem diagnostic and stakeholder consultations revealed a set of structural challenges that the policy framework was explicitly designed to address.

Regulatory burden and ambiguity were among the most consistently cited barriers. Entrepreneurs encountered excessive bureaucracy in business registration and banking, compounded by corruption and a lack of clear, accessible information on compliance requirements. The tax system was similarly described as punitive for early-stage ventures, with limited mechanisms for relief or graduated compliance.

Talent development gaps were systemic rather than isolated. The local workforce faced shortfalls in digital literacy, soft skills, and professional specialization. Curriculum misalignment between educational institutions and industry needs. High outward migration of skilled professionals continued to erode the human capital base that the ecosystem needed most.

Infrastructure deficits constrained daily business operations in tangible ways. Domestic money transfers could take up to three days to complete. Broadband access remained severely limited outside of Freetown. Inconsistent energy supply disrupted operations for businesses at every stage. These represented the issues that made scaling a business in Sierra Leone structurally harder than it needed to be.

Investment readiness was underdeveloped on both sides of the capital equation. Startups lacked the industry data, mentorship, and institutional support needed to make themselves fundable. Investors, in turn, found an unclear incentive landscape, insufficient sector intelligence, and limited structures to manage deal flow and risk. The absence of a coordinated angel investor network and formal venture support mechanisms left early-stage companies without the capital infrastructure to grow.

The Impact

The National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Policy represents Sierra Leone's first comprehensive, cabinet-level commitment to building an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.

At the policy level, the framework delivered a structured, evidence-backed document, equipping the government with the roadmap, institutional proposals, and investment frameworks needed to operationalize its Big Five Agenda.

At the ecosystem level, the process itself built alignment, centering the policy design on stakeholder voices from the Policy Workshop. The framework carries a legitimacy and practical grounding that top-down approaches typically lack. Entrepreneurs, investors, and government agencies now share a common set of priorities and a common vision — the ATR Strategy, against which progress can be measured and accountability assigned.

At the strategic level, the policy positions Sierra Leone as a serious contender in the regional innovation economy. The framework's emphasis on the Technology and Innovation Zone, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) sector opportunity, diaspora engagement, and international investment promotion gives the country a coherent value proposition to take to global markets.

When governments invest in foundational policy work, evidence-based and implementation-ready, they are not just producing documents. They are building the conditions that determine whether an entrepreneur has a realistic shot at building something that lasts.

Conclusion

Developing a national innovation and entrepreneurship policy is an act of institutional design with generational consequences. DigitA's role in this engagement demonstrated that rigorous ecosystem diagnostics, inclusive policy design, and evidence-based frameworks are as critical in policy development as they are in programme delivery. The work done in Sierra Leone is replicable and the ATR model offers a practical, adaptable blueprint for any emerging economy building its innovation ecosystem.