CEO & Founder Of Rasab Group Highlights Successes At 2025 Tech Summit

Four-and-a-half years ago our digital lifeline was fragile. The submarine-cable landing station was limping along, capacity hovered around 60 Gbps, and outages were part of daily life. When we were entrusted with that landing station, an entire nation held its breath, hoping for something better. We got to work.
• We repaired what was broken, upgraded what was outdated, and pushed international capacity to half a terabit.
• We added true redundancy, so when faults hit Ghana or Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone barely blinked.
• Wholesale prices have dropped dramatically; unreliability of a connection is now a thing of the past.
Yet we soon realized bandwidth sitting at the coast helps no one if it can’t reach homes and businesses inland.
As brilliant a job companies like Orange and Africell have done in mobile penetration, fixed broadband was lagging behind. So, we built the missing middle layer—2,000 kilometers of open-access fiber. I vividly remember that in 2018 I was quoted $3,000 for a fiber connection to my home and $400 per month for a 9-meg line; today I can get 100 megs, not pay for installation at about $50 dollars for service. That isn’t just cheaper internet— that’s opportunity priced within reach.
Next, we asked: how do you pay for the digital world once you’re connected? Mobile-money wallets were thriving, but each lived in its own walled garden. So, we stitched them together— banks, cards, wallets—through an inclusive fintech platform that lets a farmer in Kono swipe a Visa card, or a student in Freetown get paid for online work in minutes.
The fact that the creative community can now get paid for their work tells me we’ve done what we set out to do. From the outside these milestones can look very random: a landing station here, a fiber ring there, a fintech somewhere in between. But every step was part of one roadmap: open access, open possibility. To our people, Our Chief Operating Officer (possibly a Martian) he put together a dream team that chose sweat over sleep. Our Chief Technology Officer refused to accept “impossible” as an answer. Finance stretched every Leone, supply-chain wove miracles out of shortages, and our engineers climbed, spliced, and soldered through rain that would scare a fisherman. So, what would we think of next? With great pride—and a fair bit of relief—I can say Sierra Leone now boasts the first open-access, 5G Stand-Alone network in West Africa. This Nokia enabled network, runs faster, cheaper and considerably more reliable than most systems out there. Of course, like everything else we build, it also runs on renewable energy thanks to our partners Cross-Boundary. A bunch of brand-new towers, co-location with some of our MNO partners, some clever rooftop placing, AND we are now ready for any operator—incumbent, newcomer, or the entrepreneur still writing code in a dorm room. It is infrastructure built for competition, for innovation, and for the dreams of the dreamers. It is open access which is the operative word and the favorite of the madam minister of communication. Open Ran. With all of this said, and as proud as I am of this amazing moment and this amazing infrastructure, I can’t possibly forget to thank the Government and their vision and stubbornness into what Sierra Leone of the future should look like. For these technologies and audacious ideas to come life, the confidence to invest, the idea that the country is even ready for these advances comes from this Government and of course the regulator. The encouragement we have received and the continued aspirations of this government gives us and our financial partners the confidence needed to make this level of investment. So, thank you.
To every Sierra Leonean, I say: our digital runway is now as smooth and fast as anywhere on Earth. It should be no different if you are in London, Dubai or New York City, Freetown and 5G have arrived. Step onto it. Build on it. Break things—then build them better. Let’s watch and see what the next generation creates. Thank you for trusting us, for challenging us, and for celebrating with us. Enjoy the summit—let the packets fly.