As Sierra Leone’s first Minister of Communication, Technology, and Innovation, Salima Bah sees her role as not merely regulating the ecosystem, but aggressively engineering it.
Appointed at just 32, Bah has moved with the speed of a founder to operationalise President Julius Maada Bio’s vision of making Sierra Leone the “Estonia of Africa.” She has leveraged the privatisation of the state’s fibre assets to drive a digital explosion. Under her leadership, international bandwidth capacity has surged from 90 gigabits per second (Gbps) to over 500Gbps, laying the rails for an open-access 5G standalone network. “You can’t talk about technology or innovation if your infrastructure isn’t there,” she told TechCabal in a July interview.
Bah operates on the conviction that internet access is “a basic human right,” a philosophy backed by over $132 million in direct government investment during her tenure. From connecting universities via Starlink to breaking ground on the Felei Tech City—a 130-acre Special Economic Zone in Bo District designed as a “living lab” for startups and data centres—she has shown that the government’s role is a “conductor” that creates the enabling environment for the tech ecosystem to play its music.
Sierra Leone is a small market, but under Bah’s leadership, it has stopped thinking like one. She is building a system where talent is the export and connectivity is the currency, proving that with the right architect, even a small nation can punch well above its weight class.
