Meet Sierra Leone’s Essential Workers: The Human Resource Manager

I lead a Human Resources and Recruitment company here in Freetown. Last year we built this office to facilitate face to face training. Learning is one of our core offerings. When we opened, our goal was for people to come into our facility to train. We shut down for several months due to the pandemic and stopped hosting the training.

This week, we hosted a special World Youth Skills Day event to reduce barriers to access for those who want to participate in the new Workforce Recovery Initiative launched by the Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation. It is a partnership between Sierra Leone and Coursera, the online learning platform. Up to 50,000 Sierra Leoneans can register to take online courses for free between now and December.

While in most other countries, computer literacy is high, here, people need more assistance. For World Youth Skills Day, I organized an open house for anyone who needed help registering for the Workforce Recovery Initiative. I help them enroll, and for those who are unsure of the courses to take, I provide career guidance.

To ensure that we could reopen our doors to the public, we adhere to COVID-19 safety measures. We check everyone’s temperature at the door, there is a handwashing station, no one is allowed on the premises without a mask, and the computers get sanitized after every use.

Globally 70% of learners are out of school because of COVID-19. The only way to continue learning is to move online. I’ve been in human resource development for over 13 years. What I have learned is that while Sierra Leoneans have a passion for learning, our citizens need more support services if they are to benefit from all that the internet has to offer.

Credit: Essential Stories/OSIWA

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