The Minister of Technical and Higher Education, Dr. Haja Ramatulai Wurie, has, in a technical planning retreat held on the 7th- 8th August, 2023 by her Ministry’s Professional Wing at Freetown Polytechnic in Jui, admonished Management and Staff of her Ministry to improve on quality as they align their Strategic Plan with the Sierra Leone Global Partnership for Education Compact (GPE Compact), the Sierra Leone Education Sector Plan (ESP 2022-2026), and the 2023 New Direction Government’s Manifesto Commitment on “Improving Technical and Higher Education.”
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In her statement, Dr. Haja Ramatulai Wurie started off by urging members present to imbibe the culture of being proactive by looking ahead to see what potential problems would be and putting measures in place to address them beforehand. She entreated members to plan in such a way that whatever is achieved in the next 100 days builds the foundation for what should be achieved in subsequent years.
“We need to be very intentional about what we do to ensure that we get to that common goal that we are all working towards,” she said.
Key areas that she mentioned with regards the Ministry being proactive are outlined as follows:
i. To ensure that Management and Staff of the Ministry use official email addresses which are Government-lead and in a secure server
ii. To have up-to-date database of Sierra Leonean students in China
iii. To have a list of countries that offer scholarships to Sierra Leonean students and ensure that the subjects that they offer align with what Sierra Leone needs in terms of national development (especially with the Big Five)
iv. To harmonize remuneration of students in a bid to ensure that certain set of students are not disadvantaged
v. To ensure that Kono University of Science and Technology kick-starts in the next 100 days
vi. To meet with the National Executive for Academic Staff Association (ASA) to ensure that their conditions of service are addressed
vii. To encourage the Conference of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) for them to engage in income generation activities to support the Ministry, by ensuring that they continue to build upon the gains that they have made within the research space
viii. To encourage Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to digitize their systems, put together plagiarism software and ensure that students defend their dissertation or thesis
ix. To ensure that TVET education is given more credence in a bid to leave no one behind in the acquisition of education. This could be done by recruiting more lecturers to support the transformation of GTIs to community colleges as this could help cushion the huge number of students that could not make it to mainstream academic universities
x. To support agriculture as a flagship programme by prioritizing it in the advertisement of international scholarships
xi. To develop harmonized curricula
xii. To work with NCTVA regarding the backlog in the issuance of certificates for students who have already gone through their courses
xiii. To hold regular town hall meetings to ensure that the voices of parents and caregivers are captured
xiv. And to strengthen communication platforms in a more digitized fashion
MTHE’s Deputy Minister of Technical and Higher Education urged the management and staff of the Ministry to have a moment of self-reflection in a bid to assess their individual staff capacity as well as the Ministry’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and see how resources can be attracted to enhance efficiency in service delivery.
He encouraged members to critically identify all other MDAs whose activities MTHE needs to support, adding that more robust mechanisms should be put in place to monitor what obtains in the HEIs and TVET institutions across Sierra Leone.
In her presentation to the Minister on conclusions reached in respect of the alignment process during the two-day retreat, MTHE’s Director of Monitoring and Evaluation, Christiana Samu, said that the Ministry has developed a new Strategic Plan ranging from 2022 to 2026 which is in tandem with the lifespan of the current ESP (2022-2026). According to her, there are 98 activities in the new Strategic Plan, 36 strategic outcomes, nine strategic objectives, and four pillars, out of which, 32 prioritized activities for the next 100 days were derived.
MTHE’s Deputy Chief Technical and Higher Education Officer, Musu Gorvie, said that the idea of having the retreat was deliberate and purposeful in the sense that since the launch of the ESP 2022-2026, the Ministry had not aligned the approved activities in the said document with its Strategic plan produced in 2021. She mentioned the importance of upgrading the said Strategic Plan with the New Direction Government’s Manifesto and the GPE Compact (an extract from the ESP) to enhance effective implementation of activities. She further said that the final plan would be cascaded to the Ministry’s subsidiary institutions so as to entreat them to equally align their own institutional plan with the Ministry’s.
Credit: Ministry Of Technical and Higher Education, Sierra Leone
