Edward Kwame Yankson is a career Civil Servant with 26(twenty-six) years’ experience in the public sector and a retired football player and former Captain of Bo Rangers FC and Wellington People FC both in tier one of the Sierra Leone Football Association leagues. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English- Literature from Njala University, Sierra Leone and several post- graduate Diplomas and Certificates in Telecommunications, Information Communications Technology (ICT) and Cyber Security Leadership from the United States Telecommunications Training Institute (USTTI) in Washington DC, USA, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, the Wuhan Research Institute, Wuhan, China, and the National University of Singapore e-Learning Centre, Singapore.
Mr. Yankson started his career path as a newspaper Journalist working with For Di People Independent Newspaper as a Sport Reporter and later the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Service as a Disc Jockey and Sports Commentator. He also worked for BBC African Service Fast Track as a Freelance Sports Reporter. He joined the Sierra Leone Civil Service on 31st July, 2001 after two years of service as a Teacher at the Annie Walsh Memorial School, Freetown. He was posted to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting then and spent 15(fifteen) years contributing to the growth and transformation of that Ministry.
He is a major contributor to the design and implementation of several telecommunications and ICT policies and programs; ranging from the Landing of the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) Submarine Cable, The West Africa Rural Communications Infrastructure Project (WARCIP), the ECOWAS Wide Area Network Project (ECOWAN) among others.
In his capacity as Chairman of the Project Implementation Unit of the ECOWAN Project, he supervised the deployment of 660 KM of terrestrial fiber connecting Guinea and neighboring Liberia to Sierra Leone. He served as Manager of the National Communications Strategy Project funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) from 2006 to 2007. In 2013, he set up the Right to Access Information Commission and became its first Executive Secretary. Two years of service at the Commission on secondment re-engineered his leadership potentials and was posted to the Ministry of Health as Director of Human Resources in 2017.
In 2018 he transformed a once moribund Ministry of Political and Public Affairs within the space of two years and organized the famous Bintumani 3 Conference in 2019 that informed the creation of the Independent Commission for Peace and National Cohesion. He was later posted to the Ministry of Information and Communications as Senior Permanent Secretary in 2020 where he served for eighteen months and in August 2022 transferred to the Ministry of Tourism and Cultural Affairs and now with the Ministry of Transport and Aviation.
