Africa-Press – Sierra-Leone. The Ministry of Finance, through its Directorate of Financial Management Systems and Technology (DFMST), hosted a two-day stakeholders’ workshop on July 23rd and 24th, 2025, to develop a roadmap for the Public Financial Management (PFM) Interoperability framework for Sierra Leone.
The workshop, held at the Sierra Palms Hotel, brought together senior and technical staff from various government ministries, departments, and agencies involved in public finance and technology, as well as representatives from development partner organizations.
Dr. Simeon Jonjo, Director of DFMST at the Ministry of Finance, highlighted that despite significant government investment in technological initiatives over the past decade—leading to the development and deployment of numerous critical systems—most of these government systems currently operate independently without interconnectivity.
To address this challenge, Dr. Jonjo explained that the Ministry of Finance has adopted a consolidated interagency approach to Systems Interoperability. This approach aims to support effective data warehousing, analytics, business intelligence, and informed decision-making. He added that the new system is designed to operate with specific terms of reference, independent of daily institutional operations, to ensure the government has the necessary authority and capacity to implement an Interoperability Roadmap within the Sierra Leonean public service.
Dr. Jonjo emphasized that this program is expected to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase transparency and accountability, and enhance collaboration and service delivery.
Matthew Dingie, the Financial Secretary, expressed gratitude to the World Bank for its funding support to this initiative through the Sierra Leone Second Financial Inclusion project. He pointed out that several government systems, including those from the Ministry of Finance, the Accountant General, National Public Procurement Authority, Audit Service, Bank of Sierra Leone, NaSSIT, and NCRA, rely on each other for information. However, due to their independent nature, they currently depend on manual data sharing processes, which compromises data quality.
The Financial Secretary urged participants to identify and address the technical, legal, and policy bottlenecks hindering interoperability among PFM systems.
Oluwale Pratt, lead consultant and CEO of PCL International, clarified that this PFM interoperability roadmap framework will serve as the strategic policy governance blueprint for the Government Service Bus. He stressed that the exercise’s primary focus is to make PFM systems interoperable, rather than all government systems.
Over the two-day workshop, officials from various Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) shared insights into their institutional reforms and discussed how their efforts could contribute to achieving interoperability within PFM systems.
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