By Amin Kef Sesay
One of the richest personalities in the world, Bill Gates has in a moving article eulogized the current Minister of Basic Education in Sierra Leone Dr. David Moinina Sengeh.
Bill Gates said he met David Moinina Sengeh, when he was a college senior studying biomedical engineering. He narrated how the University President asked him to introduce David at a lecture he, Bill, was giving, and he charmed the crowd by talking about the ways they are both similar (we both want people to live healthy, fulfilling lives) and how they are different (in their hairstyles).
“I remember being blown away by his intellect, his ambition, and his sense of humour,” Bill Gates highlighted adding how it was clear that David had a bright future ahead of him, but said he does not think anyone could have predicted where David could end up just a few years later: as Sierra Leone’s first Chief Innovation Officer and youngest ever Education Minister.
Bill intimated that David grew up in Bo, the second largest city in Sierra Leone, that his uncle was a surgeon, and David would sometimes get to sit in and observe his procedures.
He said David remembers one time when a woman showed up for her surgery only to be turned away and his uncle explained that the hospital where he worked didn’t have an ultrasound machine, and he wasn’t comfortable performing the procedure blind.
According to him just a few hours later, during a different procedure, the lights went out in the operating room with a patient open on the table.
Bill Gates said that is when he realized what he wanted to do with his life: to make sure every health care worker had access to the tools they needed. “I left that day thinking it was great to be a doctor, but I wanted to do biomedical engineering,” says David. According to Bill, David went abroad to study—first at a university in Norway and then at Harvard (which is where we met).
He pointed out that even though David was halfway around the world, the latter never stopped thinking about how to help people back home—especially the more than 27,000 Sierra Leoneans who became amputees during the country’s civil war in the 1990s.
Bill Gates narrated that many of the disabled people David knew growing up chose not to wear prosthetics because they were painful and fit poorly.
He said David decided to spend his doctoral studies designing a more comfortable prosthetic and ended up creating an innovative new process for fitting prosthetics.
Based on what he said it uses an MRI to create a precise measurement of a patient’s remaining limb and a 3D printer to create a socket that fits as close to perfectly as possible.
Continuing, Bill narrated that after finishing his Ph.D. and spending some time in Nairobi studying disease data, David got a phone call that would change his life.
Sierra Leone’s new President, Julius Maada Bio, Bill Gates stated, wanted him to come home and serve as his country’s first ever chief innovation officer. Bill said he accepted and has been a remarkable advocate for Sierra Leone ever since.
He pointed out that David and President Bio even joined him at the Foundation’s Goalkeepers event a couple years ago to talk about their work together.
Bill said through his role as CIO, David is working to better integrate technology into every part of Sierra Leone’s Government and support the next generation of entrepreneurs.
According to him, David has helped develop data visualization tools that local leaders can use to guide decision making. Bill added that his expertise has been invaluable as Sierra Leone creates new digital tools for its citizens, like a secure electronic health records system.
He stated that David was doing such a great job when in 2019, he was asked to take on a second role as the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education.
Bill Gates revealed that just a couple months later, the COVID-19 pandemic started and David has been deeply involved in the country’s response between his two roles.
He said Sierra Leone didn’t see its first case of COVID-19 until the end of March 2020, but David and his Government colleagues started planning as soon as it became clear the virus posed a serious threat. “We had a vision and a strategy that was informed by the numbers from around the world,” he says.
He noted that David believes Sierra Leone’s experience during the 2014 Ebola epidemic made them better prepare for COVID-19 saying he gives credit to the people of Sierra Leone for immediately understanding how important it was to get the virus under control.
Bill stated how the population took quarantine restrictions seriously from the beginning and as a result, the country has kept case counts relatively low throughout the pandemic.
He said David believes Sierra Leone’s experience during the 2014 Ebola epidemic made them better prepared for COVID-19.
According to Bill Gates building on David’s work as CIO, Sierra Leone is using a robust data collection system to monitor COVID cases. He pointed out that if someone starts to feel ill, the individual can text an automated system to check the symptoms.
He furthered that if someone needs to quarantine, there’s an app an individual can use to make sure he or she receives any supplies needed to stay safe. Bill said in turn, local Governments are able to use the data collected by those apps to make informed decisions about when to close things down and when to open back up.
Bill also narrated that the country was also able to reinstate a number of programs created for the Ebola outbreak.
He said, for example, in March 2020, David and his colleagues knew that the school closures that were starting to happen around the world would soon become necessary in Sierra Leone.
Bill pointed out that they immediately began to rebuild the Government’s radio teaching program stating how some kids live in parts of the country so rural that radio signals don’t reach them, and the Government arranged to have printed materials delivered to them. He said Kids who lived in bigger cities with internet access were able to take classes online.
He furthered that Sierra Leone’s ability to implement lessons learned from the last epidemic gives him hope stating that although Ebola was devastating for the people of Sierra Leone, the country emerged stronger and better prepared for future public health crises.
Bill Gates expressed optimism that the same will be true for the world after COVID-19.
“COVID showed us that we have to use technologies that allow us to have an impact,” says David. “This is an opportunity to reset, reimagine, and rethink.”
He pointed out how David Sengeh has achieved so much—and helped Sierra Leone navigate such extraordinary times—that it’s hard to believe he’s only 34 years old.
Bill Gates said he is confident that many will be hearing about David’s amazing work for decades to come.
