David Moinina Sengeh

David Sengeh grew up in Sierra Leone during one of West Africa's bloodiest civil wars. Two of his uncles were killed. A girl who lived next door was shot by a stray bullet. He survived, and when a scholarship brought him to Flekke in 2004, he chose RCN partly because of that contrast: Norway sat at the top of the Human Development Index, Sierra Leone near the bottom. He wanted to feel that difference.

At RCN he was already restless in the way people with too many interests tend to be. He rapped with his siblings, competed in debating, played sports, advocated for children's rights. That breadth followed him to Harvard, where he studied Engineering Sciences, and then to MIT's Media Lab for a PhD in biomechatronics.

His dissertation focused on prosthetic sockets, specifically why amputees in Sierra Leone were often given prosthetics they stopped wearing. The sockets chafed. They bruised. Using MRI imaging and 3D printing, he designed personalized interfaces that actually fit. It was a precise, unglamorous problem, and it came directly from something he had seen at home.

From MIT he went to IBM Research Africa in Nairobi, then back to Sierra Leone. In 2018 he became the country's first Chief Innovation Officer. In 2019 he was made Minister of Education. In 2023, President Julius Maada Bio appointed him Chief Minister, the country's second-highest government position.
His phrase when asked about his governing style: "I usually say, 'Let's go to the lab.'" He has run hackathons in government buildings, pushed laptops into every school in Pujehun District, and co-founded Global Minimum, an NGO running student innovation competitions across Sierra Leone, Kenya, and South Africa.

He still lists RCN first on his resume. He has said Flekke was where he learned that difference, between people, between countries, between what is and what could be, has value.