When Ahmed Koroma walked into the Learn2Earn introductory session this week, he did not come empty-handed. The engineering student at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, in his twenties and living in the western end of Freetown already designs graphics, edits video, and builds website front-ends. What he came for was the bridge between those skills and a paying client. That bridge is the whole point of the programme.
Left – Ahmed Koroma, engineering student at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone
This week, 60 young Sierra Leoneans began a three-week journey designed to take them from skill to income, not in theory, but in live online work with real clients paying real money. They are the second cohort of Learn2Earn, the gig-economy and freelancing programme implemented by the Ministry of Communication, Technology and Innovation in partnership with the International Trade Centre through the READY Salone Project, KOICA, and UNICEF Sierra Leone. The programme trains young Sierra Leoneans in practical digital skills and then links them to paid, task-based work online. For the wider economy, it opens up remote and digital earning, builds a pool of talent that businesses can hire on demand, and generates workforce data that can feed into policy and planning.
The case for the programme sits in the numbers. The African Development Bank estimated youth unemployment in Sierra Leone at 10% in 2022, with underemployment running significantly higher. The pressure that creates is measurable. An Afrobarometer survey published last September found that 57% of Sierra Leoneans have considered leaving the country, and of those, 55% cited the search for better employment.
Learn2Earn offers a different proposition. Instead of waiting for jobs to arrive, a young person with a laptop, a skill and a mentor can compete for work on the global internet today. The approach aligns with the Ministry’s contribution to the Government’s target of helping create 65,000 jobs in the technology and innovation sector and follows World Bank estimates that 230 million jobs across sub-Saharan Africa will require digital skills by 2030.
The December 2025 pilot trained 30 participants over one month, combining in-person orientation, virtual mentoring and applications for live freelance projects. Several participants finished the pilot with paid work in hand, won on global freelancing platforms against international competition. Among them was Aruna Kallon, a student of electrical and electronics engineering at Fourah Bay College, who joined looking for practical skills he could use alongside his studies. Within his first week he had built a focused professional profile, applied with intention, and secured two freelance jobs on Upwork. His path from orientation to income, in a matter of weeks, is exactly the journey the programme is named for. Cohort 2 now doubles that intake to 60, drawn from a far wider field: more than 300 applications arrived from 12 of the country’s 16 districts.
That application pool also shows the work still ahead. More than two thirds of applicants came from Western Area Urban, and fewer than a quarter were young women. Reaching beyond Freetown and closing the gender gap are now openly part of the programme’s task, not an afterthought to it. Among applicants, 4.6% were persons with disabilities, a group for whom remote digital work can remove barriers that physical workplaces still impose.
Cohort 2 runs over three weeks, pairing each participant with a mentor who guides them through the tasks and supports their progress. The structure is already in motion. A first virtual session on building a professional digital identity opened on 16 June, followed by a second on 18 June covering professionalism and community success. Physical sessions on 19 and 20 June move participants into onboarding and profile completion.
What sets this cohort apart is the platform beneath it. Participants will work through the Bounty Platform, built for Sierra Leone by a Sierra Leonean team, Christex Foundation. The platform matches people to skill-aligned tasks using AI and handles rewards and credentials on the blockchain. Its features include verified on-chain profiles; short one-off bounties for quick wins; longer projects for deeper experience; a leaderboard that spotlights top performers and earners; and curated learning resources anchored by an inspiration stack of standout work. The platform training young Sierra Leoneans to earn from the global digital economy was itself built by young Sierra Leoneans. The programme is not only importing opportunities. It is showcasing local capacity to build the infrastructure of that opportunity.
Over the coming weeks, this cohort will complete their profiles, take on their first bounties, and begin the harder test the programme is named for: turning learning into earning. Their results, the jobs completed and the income generated, will be the real measure of whether the model works at this scale.
For now, 60 young people have stepped into the gig economy with a platform, a mentor and a path. The next chapter belongs to them.
