Sierra Leone - AI Readiness Diagnostic.

Overview & Synopsis

In Sierra Leone, while artificial intelligence (AI) adoption remains limited to date, interest in identifying specific use cases is growing across government, academia, and the private sector. Governments everywhere are navigating uncharted waters as they seek to capitalize on AI’s rapidly evolving capabilities while designing safeguards to mitigate associated risks. This is taking place against the backdrop of a widening global AI divide. For Sierra Leone, strengthening the foundations for AI readiness will be critical to expanding the range of AI applications that the country can responsibly adopt, adapt, and sustain over time. As these foundations strengthen, AI can increasingly contribute to the country’s development objectives and improve outcomes for people, including through better public services and greater economic opportunities. At the same time, countries do not need to wait for all these foundations to be fully developed before beginning to benefit from AI. “Small AI” solutions—affordable and accessible systems designed to perform specific tasks under real-world resource constraints—offer a promising pathway for tackling development challenges in the near term, while investments in stronger foundations progressively expand what becomes possible. Realizing these opportunities will also require close partnership with the private sector, which is likely to play a central role in driving AI adoption and adaptation and in bringing AI-enabled services to businesses and households. This Report aims to support the government of Sierra Leone as it prepares a national AI strategy and works to accelerate digital transformation more broadly. The Report presents the results of a diagnostic exercise conducted in close partnership between the World Bank Group and Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Communications, Technology and Innovation. Through a combination of in-country stakeholder consultations and desk research, the Report assessed the strength of key AI enablers to identify gaps in the enabling environment and areas where AI can play a constructive role in achieving national development priorities. On this basis, the Report outlines short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations. To sequence and prioritize recommendations, the Report uses the Adopt, Adapt, Advance (3A) framework. Given the overall maturity of Sierra Leone’s digital ecosystem, the Report proposes focusing on a combination of the adoption pathway (which refers to the use of off-the-shelf AI tools and solutions) and, as digital foundations are strengthened, the adaptation pathway (which refers to customization of existing AI models to suit local contexts, languages, or use cases). The advancement pathway, which involves pretraining large, advanced models from scratch, building proprietary AI architectures, and conducting frontier AI research, is currently only feasible in a small number of countries given its reliance on frontier-scale compute and advanced research capabilities. AI readiness depends on the maturity of four foundations—Context, Connectivity, Compute, and Competency— that in turn require strong legal and institutional enablers for coordination and responsible AI governance (Figure A; collectively, the 4Cs+R Framework, with “R” referring to Responsible AI). The Report examines the current state of each of these core elements as a basis for the proposed recommendations. Instead of attempting to clearly distinguish between foundational needs for general digital transformation and AI-specific readiness, this Report uses the 3A lens to explain how the government’s vision for leveraging AI drives specific needs across these foundational 4Cs+R pillars.