The Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation has established the .SL ccTLD Stakeholder Working Group to guide the transfer of Sierra Leone’s national internet domain, .sl, to local management.
The Working Group was constituted at the Preliminary Consultation on the Repatriation and Redelegation of the .SL ccTLD, held today. This was the first technical engagement with key partners on the framework and scope of the initiative.
The .sl registry, the national database that records every .sl domain and directs it to the correct server, is currently hosted outside Sierra Leone. More than 2,500 .sl addresses rely on it, including the websites and email services of institutions and businesses across the country.
The consultation convened mobile network operators, internet service providers and heads of universities. It was chaired by the Ministry’s Director of Technology, with the Permanent Secretary, the Deputy Minister, the Director of Policy, Research and Compliance and the Project Coordinator of the Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project (SLDTP) in attendance.
The Working Group will support the development of a governance framework for .sl under national management. Its membership and mandate will be presented to a wider national consultation, which is expected to support Sierra Leone’s redelegation request to IANA, the global body responsible for coordinating country-code domains.
Stakeholder engagement is the first phase of the process, which will then proceed in two stages. Repatriation involves migrating the registry to sovereign infrastructure hosted within Sierra Leone. Redelegation is the formal IANA procedure that recognises the new arrangement. The new registry will also introduce stronger security, helping to ensure that users visiting a .sl address reach the authentic site.
The .sl domain was first registered in 1997, with Sierratel as its manager. Registration services have been managed by a private operator since 2007.
This initiative is funded by the World Bank Group through the Sierra Leone Digital Transformation Project.
Here are some pictures from today’s engagement.
