President Julius Maada Bio said his government has prioritized human capacity development as a foundation for the country’s economic and social development. He reiterated his commitment when he presented his June 2023 election manifesto to the people of Sierra Leone, by indicating Human Capital Development: Nurturing Skills for 21st Century Industry.
He said that in the absence of quality education, it would be difficult to move the development process forward, noting that without access to quality education, children would not have the right start in life.
‘’Building our human capital base continues to be a priority for his government in the past five years. We made tremendous gains with our Free Quality Secondary Education flagship, with the country experiencing one of the largest pass rates in the university entrance examination in recent times,’’ President Bio said.
Adding that his government is poised to achieve even bigger gains with the policy and legislative foundation he has laid and learned in the process that investing in Foundational Learning will make jobs easier at the primary and secondary levels.
He furthered that the Higher and Technical Education his government made gains by expanding access, especially in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, and Mathematics (STEAM) courses. He said the government established technical and vocational centers in almost every chiefdom in the country.
He continued that investment in health systems will continue to be a key driver for building a productive society ready to add value in the modern era and will build skills for the health sector by focusing on specialized skills, and mass public health and emergency systems to meet the rising demand for healthcare in the country.
Creating equal opportunity for women across all facets of life is a core goal of the human capital development agenda. The Government will build on the Gender Equity and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) ACT 2022 to support women’s active and productive participation in government and the private sector.
In the next five years, the SLPP government will focus on translating these gains into developing a highly skilled labor force that is ready for the 21st-century industry and will focus on reducing the missing middle in our labor force. At the same time, develop talents for professional jobs in the private sector and the civil service.
The SLPP government pledges to sustain government budget allocation on education, continue to expand access in primary and secondary education, invest in foundational learning, provide free sanitary pads to girls in schools, continue to invest to attract women in STEAM courses, provide funding from Technical and Vocational Training in universities and other formal Government sponsored training institutions, implement the Sierra Leone Health Insurance Scheme to expand access to health care and reduce out-of-pocket expenditure.
The President Bio-led administration sought to extend free healthcare services to all school-going children nationwide, digitalize the HRH system to inform human resource planning, management, and decision-making, develop a robust plan for the implementation of the GEWE Policy 2020 and Gender
Empowerment Act 2022.
Mainstreaming gender empowerment in policy and programming across the board, while building the capacity of the Ministry of Labour to provide certification for training in Technical Vocational Stills and a Labour Management Information System (LMIS) and establish a wage support scheme for people that get certification and get hired in technical and vocational jobs.
