What Eighteen Months of Building Together Looks Like

Bangkok / Monrovia — 30 May 2026 The Liberia eBorder Foundation Program is now live — and the partnership behind it offers a different model of how border modernization gets done.

On 30 May 2026, the Liberia Immigration Service launched the Liberia eBorder Solution – Foundation Program at Roberts International Airport, beginning live operations of a digital entry and exit system developed in partnership with Somapa Information Technology PCL. The launch is the visible moment in a story that has taken eighteen months to write. The more interesting story is how that time was spent.

When the Liberia Immigration Service and Somapa IT signed a Memorandum of Understanding in December 2024, neither side treated the document as a finish line. Over the months that followed, Somapa IT teams travelled repeatedly to Liberia. They sat with LIS officers in workshops. They walked the land borders. They stood inside Roberts International Airport. They met every week, online from Bangkok with the LIS project team, to listen, to plan, and to learn together. They worked alongside the partner agencies — Civil Aviation, Airport Authority, Ministry of Transport, security and health agencies — who would carry the work alongside LIS.

This is what Somapa IT means by partnership, and it is the part of the work that does not appear in technical specifications.

“We do not arrive with a finished product and ask a country to accept it. We design together. We build together. We learn the country. We learn the borders. We learn the people who protect them.”

— Mr. Subhaprasert Wongsuwan, Chief Executive Officer, Somapa Information Technology PCL.

Somapa IT positions itself as a service and expertise company rather than a vendor. The distinction sounds small until it is tested. A vendor sells a system. A service and expertise company builds with a customer, shares what it knows, transfers skills, and accepts that the country it serves will end up with capability the vendor model would have kept in-house. Thirty years of building border, immigration, and government technology across Southeast Asia taught Somapa IT that the systems that last are the ones the country itself comes to own.

The Foundation Program tested that approach against a different kind of pressure. Earlier in 2026, the Commissioner General of the Liberia Immigration Service wrote to Somapa IT describing an urgent operational challenge at Liberia's primary international airport and asking for help. Somapa IT adapted. The Foundation Program was scoped as a focused, three-month live pilot — a working entry and exit system that responds to the immediate need while broader discussions on the full Liberia eBorder Solution continue. It is not a full deployment, and it is not pretending to be. It is a deliberate first step, taken at the pace LIS asked for, built around what LIS actually needed.

“Border modernisation is a matter we take seriously, and a matter we do not rush. Working with Somapa IT over the past eighteen months has shown us a partner prepared to move at the pace we require, to respond when the need is urgent, and to design alongside us rather than for us. The Foundation Program reflects that approach.”

— Col. Elijah F. Rufus, Commissioner General, Liberia Immigration Service

What is now live at Roberts International Airport reflects that thinking. Officers at the inspection counter have automated passport reading, biometric capture, and immediate checking against the LIS persons of interest database. LIS Headquarters has, for the first time, the ability to search live movement data, identify patterns relevant to public health, trafficking, and revenue protection, and create alerts that activate at the border the moment a record is entered. The system identifies persons of interest on identity attributes rather than document details alone — meaning individuals of concern can still be matched even when travelling under altered or newly issued documents.

But the technology is not the point of the story. What the technology does is equip officers to make better decisions and give Headquarters the visibility to direct resources where they are needed most. The Commissioner General captured the priority cleanly:

“Modernisation is not merely about systems and infrastructure. It is equally about people, professionalism, accountability, training, and institutional readiness.”

— Col. Elijah F. Rufus, Commissioner General, Liberia Immigration Service

For Somapa IT, that is the right test. Technology that empowers the people closest to the work is technology worth deploying. Technology that replaces them, or that depends on outside expertise indefinitely, is not.

Somapa IT has come prepared to back the partnership for the full life of the pilot. Engineers are on the ground in Monrovia alongside LIS officers. A dedicated technical support team in Bangkok is online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the full duration of the program. When LIS officers need support, the support is there.

“Trust is not given. Trust is earned. Day by day. Scan by scan. Traveller by traveller. Over the next three months, that is what we intend to do.”

— Mr. Subhaprasert Wongsuwan, CEO, Somapa Information Technology PCL.

The Foundation Program is the first major engagement Somapa IT has undertaken in Africa. It is delivered under the company's Breaking Through the Global strategy — a deliberate extension, marked by the company's 20th anniversary, of the same collaborative, service-led model that has built two decades of partnerships in Southeast Asia into new operating environments. For governments observing the work in Liberia, the proposition is straightforward: a mature border technology partner can move from Memorandum of Understanding to live operational deployment in eighteen months, adapt to urgent operational need without abandoning a long-term roadmap, and leave behind not just a system, but capability that belongs to the country.

That is the partnership model Somapa IT has spent twenty years refining. Liberia is where it now operates in Africa for the first time.

About the Liberia eBorder Solution

The Liberia eBorder Solution is a national border platform proposed under the LIS–Somapa IT Memorandum of Understanding. It is designed to digitise border management across Liberia's land and air borders, strengthen border security, and modernise immigration operations. Under the full proposed solution, capability would expand to Liberia's land borders, integrate advance passenger information, and ultimately transfer to the Government of Liberia under a build–operate–transfer model — built around the principle of securing borders and promoting prosperity for the people of Liberia.

About Somapa Information Technology PCL.

Somapa Information Technology PCL. is a Bangkok-headquartered technology and services company specialising in border management, immigration systems, and government digital infrastructure. Now in its 20th year, Somapa IT has built long-standing partnerships with immigration, customs, and security authorities across Southeast Asia. Through its Breaking Through the Global strategy, the company is extending its proven delivery model — combining technology with embedded expertise, skills transfer, and long-term service commitment — into new geographies. The partnership with the Liberia Immigration Service marks the company's first major engagement in Africa.