0pening remarks at the official launch on the report on needs assessment survey conducted for higher education institutions in Sierra Leone .

Honourable Minister of Technical & Higher Education, Professor Alpha T. Wurie,

Chairman, Parliamentary Oversight Committee on Technical & Higher Education,

            Honorable Festus M. Lansana,

Her Excellency, Lisa Chesney, British High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, 

Deputy Minister of Technical & Higher Education, Hon. Sarjoh Aziz-Kamara,

Chairperson, Tertiary Education Commission, Professor Aliyageen Alghali & other

            Commissioners

Heads of Governmental Agencies & other Senior Government Officials,

Heads of Higher Education Institutions, and Senior academics,

Colleagues from the International Development Community,

Private Sector Executives,

Civil Society Leaders,

Friends from the Mass Media,

Ladies & Gentlemen:

Good morning and welcome to this important event organized by the Tertiary Education Commission to publicly present and formally launch the Report on the Needs Assessment Survey of Higher Education Institutions in Sierra Leone.

I wish to thank you all for being here despite your busy schedules. This indicates to us the high importance that you attach to higher education and its role in society and national development.

Permit me to congratulate the government especially the Honorable Minister of Technical and Higher Education for providing the resources and support to the TEC to undertake the needs assessment survey and arrange for the launching of the survey report today.

I am delighted by the great opportunity this event presents to finally put higher education squarely on the development and public policy agenda in Sierra Leone. In the 12 months that I have lived and worked in Sierra Leone, I have been struck by the almost complete exclusion of higher education from public discourse on economic development, social transformation, and national integration. I have been particularly puzzled by the near-zero attention in the mass media to the relationship between higher education and sustainable development given that we live in an increasingly competitive knowledge-based global economy.

In fact, since the mid-1990s, substantial hard evidence has emerged from across the developing world that countries which comparatively invested more in tertiary education over several years recorded more impressive rates of improvement in their economic and human development indicators. It is now well-established that when consciously linked to research and development efforts in the productive sectors of the economy, investments in higher education deliver huge rates of return through production of critically needed middle and high-level human capital, boosting of labour productivity, generation and dissemination of solutions-oriented knowledge, fostering of open-minded and critical citizenry, and engendering of positive social and behavioural change.

The NAS report we are launching today is therefore timely. I can tell you for free that it is a rich mine of data and insights on the state of higher education institutions in Sierra Leone and what needs to be done to transform them to better contribute to the accelerated achievement of the country’s development priorities.

I wish to appeal to everyone in this hall to pay close attention to the presentation of the report along the four clusters into which the 10 themes covered by the assessment have been categorized.  Please do also find time later to read the entire report. When you do so, you will find that one of the most frequently used phrases in it is ‘lack of’ in relation to the fundamental requirements for well-functioning higher education institutions. 

In short, it seems that the higher education sector in Sierra Leone is being vastly left behind in an era of increasing digitalization, diversification, and internationalization of higher education across the world.  So, the launching of this report must be a call-to-action for the transformation of the higher education sector for all stakeholders across the public, private and non-profit sectors with an interest in a more prosperous and harmonious Sierra Leone.

Kindly, therefore, be generous with your attention and contributions as we go through the rest of the programme.

Thank you.