By Emma Black
On Friday, April 11, 2025, Lands Minister Dr. Turad Senesie flipped the switch on a game-changing tool for Sierra Leone a continuous operating reference station (CORS) at Moyamba government hospital, one of 13 planned nationwide, this high-tech beacon marks Sierra Leone as Africa’s first to deploy such a system, aiming to tame decades of land disputes and unlock smarter development.
This isn’t just tech it’s a lifeline for fair land use, Senesie told a crowd of local leaders and surveyors, the CORS, a satellite-linked hub, churns out pinpoint-accurate survey data, slashing errors that fuel border fights, botched projects, and family feuds, from mapping farms to planning clinics, it’s set to reshape how Sierra Leone grows.
Land chaos has long scarred Sierra Leone siblings battling over plots, villages clashing over boundaries, the Bio administration’s reform push, now in high gear, sees CORS as a fix. Zdenko Kurtovic, a project consultant, called it a decision-maker’s dream, giving planners, builders, and farmers rock-solid data. No more guesswork government and businesses can move with confidence, he said.
The Moyamba station, humming quietly in the hospital compound, feeds real-time coordinates to surveyors’ tools across the district. It’s a backbone for digital land registries, soon to roll out, that’ll log plots with clarity cutting the shady deals that spark courtrooms ablaze. Senesie didn’t hold back this protects our borders, too, from village lines to national ones.
The rollout’s not just wires and signals people power it. Dozens of surveyors are now training to wield the CORS system, learning to map with precision that old methods tape measures, gut instinct couldn’t touch, we’re building skills to match the tech, Senesie said, eyeing a generation ready to redraw Sierra Leone right.
Locals like Fatmata Koroma, a Moyamba farmer, feel the shift, land fights tore my family apart, and she shared. If this makes things clear, maybe we heal. Posts on X echoed her hope, with users buzzing about land peace and Sierra Leone leading Africa.
Senesie’s claim Sierra Leone as the continent’s CORS trailblazer carries weight. No other African nation has a network like this, syncing satellites to ground truth. Beyond Moyamba, 12 more stations will blanket the country, knitting data for roads, schools, even disaster planning, it’s not just land it’s health, food, growth, Senesie said, tying it to President Bio’s vision of a digitized, dispute-free future.
As Moyamba’s CORS blinked to life, it lit a path less chaos, more clarity. Sierra Leone’s betting big: one station could spark a nation where land fuels dreams, not dramas.