During the 2014 Ebola crisis, Sierra Leone's national 117 emergency line existed in name only — calls were flowing to a single overwhelmed phone, not a functioning response system. SBTS Group, a local Sierra Leone tech and training company, repurposed its own commercial call-center training materials to turn 117 into a real 24/7 triage and reporting operation. They trained 436 agents to intake calls, assign case numbers, and flag priority cases for dispatch. When national payment systems couldn't keep responders paid, SBTS secured a $30,000 salary bridge so trained agents stayed at their posts. After the crisis, the same team trained 330 Ebola survivors in psychosocial support and entrepreneurship to help them rebuild their lives.
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When COVID-19 spread across the continent in 2020, AETRF's network didn't stand on the sidelines — it reconvened. Drawing on the same coordination model built during the 2014 Ebola response, AETRF served as the Low and Middle Income Country (LMIC) implementing partner and coordinator for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office's Frontier Technology Hub COVIDaction initiative, working alongside the Royal Academy of Engineering to build technology and innovation pipelines supporting the pandemic response across Africa and South Asia — including local production of medical equipment, digital fabrication, and community-driven solutions.
The network's contribution didn't stop there. AETRF also supported the Schmidt Futures Tech+COVID19 initiative, lending its frontline experience to a global effort matching technologists with pandemic response needs. And when the moment called for direct continental coordination, AETRF wrote to Africa CDC to offer collaboration — not waiting to be asked, but stepping forward as a partner with proven ground-level credibility.
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In Liberia's Ebola treatment units, the hardest part of care wasn't always medical. Sometimes it was the fence.
On one side, medical staff in full PPE worked inside the "hot zone," moving among patients whose lives depended on fast, accurate information. On the other side, a notetaker in the safe zone had to capture it all — gender, approximate age, what they were wearing, their symptoms. The only way to get that information across was to shout it, through a mask, across a barrier, patient after patient, and hope it landed correctly on paper.
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