ACTIONABLE INFORMATION
What Problems Keep People Awake At Night?
Code for Sierra Leone uses data to give citizens hyper-local and hyper-personal information to make better informed decisions about bread & butter issues.
Code for Sierra Leone also builds technology tools to amplify citizen voices.
AGENCY
We empower citizens.
Strong democracies rely on engaged citizens who have actionable information and easy-to-use channels for making their will known. We support civic watchdogs, government and social enterprises to meaningfully engage with citizens.
ACTION
Our society is asymmetric.
The balance of power rests with government and corporate institutions, at the expense of citizens, where citizens are treated as passive recipients of consultation or services. We build actionable data and action-orientated tools that give ‘agency’ to citizens.
ECOSYSTEMS
By the people, for the people.
We build ecosystems, because creating digital democracies is too big a task for any one organisation. We invest into existing communities and partners, and reuse existing tools and standards, because all of our work is better if we are all connected.
GET INVOLVED
Do You Want To Help Build A Better Future?
OPPORTUNITIES
Great Ideas Are Just The Start.
Innovators Also Need Seed Funding + Technologies + Mentorship To Change The World
M-WASH
A web based portal that aims to map out the existence of water and sanitation points across Freetown. The platform would also engage with the local community stakeholders and allow them to report on the working status of the different water and sanitation points via an SMS service. By crowdsourcing the information collection for this platform, MWash aims to provide some much needed real time data around water and sanitation issues in the city to the various development sector and public utility companies.
Know Your City
Want to know the infrastructure facilities available in your locality? Know Your City provides a web based platform through which the informal settlements in and around Freetown can report the various types of and condition of infrastructure facilities available in their locality. This information can then be used by advocacy groups who work on behalf of the people living in these areas.
openAFRICA
Government data is only one side of the story. Where’s all the comparative data from academic think tanks, civil society researchers, and citizen data initiatives? openAFRICA is the continent’s largest platform for independent data, with a strong Sierra Leonean collection from the nation’s leading non-government data creators.
membaO!
membaO! is a web based portal which aims to track and quantitatively report the performance of parliamentarians in Sierra Leone, especially related with regards to their voting and attendance records. The project aims to eventually bring about a change in the civic discourse around parliamentarian’s performance in the country.
africanCOMMONS
Why is everyone reinventing the wheel? Massive amounts of money and time are being wasted on rebuilding solutions for digital democracies and open data. africanCOMMONS showcases carefully selected best-of-breed open source civic technologies that have already been ‘battle tested’ elsewhere, for possible re-use in Sierra Leone.
STEAL OUR STUFF!
Everything We Build Is Open Source. We Want You To Reuse It, Free Of Charge.
Code for Sierra Leone is a member of the continental Code for Africa federation. The federation is Africa’s largest network of indigenous civic technology and open data laboratories, with affiliate members in 10 African countries and funded projects in a further 12 countries. The federation works with governments, grassroots citizen organisations, and the media to help liberate data and empower citizens. Our programmes include fellowships, tool building, data digitisation, and knowledge development, with a strong emphasis on civic engagement.
EVENTS
Stop Talking. Start Building.
Join Us To Build An Ecosystem Of Civic Innovators.
Network with a growing community.
Opening data and building civic technology that brings tangible social change requires a diverse collection of minds and skills. Our events, from bootcamps to dataquests, focus on building multi-disciplinary teams and communities.
Learn new things.
Discover tools for working with data processes that turn raw open data into something which can make a difference to someone else’s life. Join one of our workshops or knowledge shares (meetups) to see the world of data and civic engagement in a new way.
Help us open data.
We are community focussed and creating an environment where anyone can open data and create a project, initiative or idea that can be taken forward, either by our core team or a community collaboration. Join us at a lab or dataquest to co-create a better Sierra Leon!