JAMB to Help Sierra Leone Build a Centralised National Admissions Platform

Nigeria's Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) is set to export nearly five decades of institutional knowledge to West Africa, pledging technical support to the government of Sierra Leone as it works to establish a Centralised Admissions System (CAS) designed to improve transparency, efficiency, and accountability in tertiary institution admissions.

The development was announced following a high-level stakeholder engagement convened by Sierra Leone's Ministry of Technical and Higher Education (MTHE) at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Freetown, a gathering that signalled the seriousness with which Freetown is approaching the overhaul of its higher education infrastructure.

The road to this engagement began abroad. A Sierra Leonean delegation, led by Deputy Minister of Technical and Higher Education Sarjoh Aziz-Kamara, had earlier travelled to Nigeria to observe the operations of its centralised admissions model during JAMB's Annual Policy Meeting. The visit proved consequential: Nigeria's Minister of Education subsequently approved a technical mission by JAMB to Sierra Leone to share implementation strategies.

At the Freetown engagement, Sierra Leone's Minister of Technical and Higher Education, Dr. Haja Ramatulai Wurie, laid out the scope and ambition of the reform. She confirmed that the proposed Centralised Admissions System has already cleared cabinet and is underpinned by the Universities Act of 2021. The system, she explained, would bring coherence to what is currently a fragmented landscape. The reform is being implemented in collaboration with a wide network of agencies, including the Tertiary Education Commission, the West African Examinations Council, the National Civil Registration Authority, and the National Telecommunications Authority.

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Deputy Minister Aziz-Kamara offered further structural detail, disclosing that the cabinet has approved the creation of a Centralised Admissions Secretariat within the ministry to oversee the new digital platform. This institutional anchor is intended to give the reform bureaucratic permanence beyond any single administration.

A centrepiece of the meeting was JAMB's own contribution to the discussion. The board presented a framework for building a national digital admissions architecture designed to enhance transparency, improve data integrity, eliminate duplication, and strengthen educational planning.

JAMB Registrar Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, who addressed the gathering, drew on the historical parallels between the two nations' challenges. He noted that Nigeria established its centralised admissions framework in 1978 to confront difficulties strikingly similar to those currently facing Sierra Leone. But he was careful to temper any expectation of wholesale replication. Oloyede stressed that the goal is not to copy Nigeria's model outright, but to help Sierra Leone develop a system suited to its own educational realities. This position was itself echoed by Minister Wurie, who noted that Sierra Leone's objective is to adapt proven global best practices to its unique educational environment, not simply reproduce another country's framework.

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The Freetown engagement marks a meaningful deepening of educational cooperation between the two countries, with Nigeria's decades-long experience in centralised admissions now poised to inform and potentially reshape the academic futures of an entire generation of Sierra Leonean students.