THE CHALLENGE

In the wake of the post Ebola recovery in Sierra Leone, it is vital for the private sector in the country to remain resilient and play its role in revitalising the economy. In any developing country, new businesses and startups play a key role in economic growth by creating more jobs.

The Corporate Affairs Commission(CAC) in Sierra Leone has the important mandate of registering new companies in the country, asserting compliance with the laws and, most importantly, fostering an enabling environment to doing business.

However such a mandate cannot be achieved in the absence of an efficient system. For the CAC to fulfill its promise of a 24-hour registration turnaround, better monitoring and greater access to self-service, it needs to improve its processes and operations through large-scale automation.

THE SOLUTION

Our proposed solution consisted of an online Information Management System based on a Service Oriented Architecture and powered by the Odoo open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) framework. This formed the main nerve center of our solution and was directly responsible for managing core workflows and a robust Application Programming Interface (API) which other micro services and interfaces can interact with.

The system is responsible for the following functions:

  1. Online registration platform for new businesses

  2. Online company information management for existing business owners to update their company’s information, along with receiving the necessary documents from the government agencies

  3. A customer relation management(CRM) system for the CAC to carry out its correspondence with business owners

  4. Third party integration of the IMS with other government agencies

  5. A public website through which the CAC can disseminate information regarding company laws and the current business environment in Sierra Leone.

A month long proof of concept and pilot evaluation was conducted at the District Health Medical Team (DHMT) at Port Loko and the Open Government Initiative (OGI) at Freetown.

The key findings are as follows:

  1. Data intelligence and visualisation is the end product of a value chain that involves several pre-requisite activities, and any community response system must be prepared to support this entire value chain, rather than just outputting a series of final visualizations and analysis

  2. A strong stakeholder engagement strategy is essential for ensuring the success of a tech based intervention that aims to improve the delivery of a key public service

  3. Downloadable, printable copies of reports is important in a paper based”, low digital literacy context like Sierra Leone

OUR IMPACT

The project is in its final implementation stage.

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