While much has been made about IT’s role in transforming public services in the UK, there is a general scepticism about its role in development. When my partner and I volunteered together for the charity VSO and were looking for sponsorship for our placements in Sierra Leone, we faced this common reaction: how can an IT contractor help the least-developed country in the world?

At the time, I was working as a contract technical manager. I was living with my girlfriend in Surrey and spending three hours a day commuting into the City or sitting in traffic jams.

The pay was good, the people were great and the work was challenging, but frankly, I wasn’t doing much that I could point to and say “I did that”. I’m no saint, I didn’t volunteer to polish my halo. I love travel and if I could spend some time actually living somewhere new and interesting, while at the same time being able to use my skills towards a worthwhile goal, then volunteering seemed a good way to do it. VSO offered us both one-year placements in Sierra Leone and we accepted.

As is often the way with placements, mine has changed considerably from the one I came out to do. My first role was to help the Ministry of Local Government and Community Development develop its IT and communications policy. We were making great progress on this until the elections brought the whole thing to a standstill.

These were the first full elections since the end of the war and Sierra Leone showed the whole of Africa how a free and fair election should be held, culminating in a peaceful handover of power when the former opposition party won.

During the election hiatus, I met the “project next door” which was desperate for help. They had rebuilt the civil service personnel records by exhaustively searching the government offices and trawling through burned documents in the records office. They needed help creating a database to catalogue all the missing data and “anomalies”. We built this database and suggested that the b est method of completing the files and resolving anomalies was to interview every civil servant.

The UK Department for International Development agreed to fund the project and so started an intense period of training the team of 23 records managers in how to use computers; writing an interview programme that stored the responses as well as photographs and thumbprints of all interviewees; purchasing the computers, cameras and equipment; planning visit schedules and co-ordinating the various government departments.

In just four months my team visited 19 towns all over the country conducting a week of interviews in each location, twice. We conducted 15,000 interviews and the results were dramatic. Previous headcounts had had limited impact, but the approach of verifying records and taking biometrics was very effective. During the four months of the project, 850 entries on the payroll were removed as the payroll cleaned itself, and when we finished we removed a further 761 ghost workers; of those who remained, more than 1,000 were overdue for retirement. In the end we reduced the payroll by 18 per cent.

However, the best result came a few weeks later. While on one of Sierra Leone’s fabulous beaches, a guy came over and asked if I was the one who did the payroll cleaning. He shook my hand and explained that he worked at the main hospital and so many nurses had returned to work as a result of the verification that they had managed to re-open two wards. I still can’t stop myself smiling as I think of that.

We’re still in Sierra Leone; I’m now working on the next phase of the project and if you can’t see the role of computing in development, you’re not looking.

Howard Tytherleigh is an IT adviser with international development charity VSO