China pledges Yuan 2 bn in aid to SL for 2018-2020

The Chinese government has pledged Yuan 2 billion in aid to Sri Lanka for the period 2018-2020, said Chinese Ambassador to Sri Lanka Yi Xianliang.

The Chinese government’s commitment to develop capacity building, finance, technology and innovation spheres in Sri Lanka to give a further fillip to bilateral cooperation between China and Sri Lanka would continue, he said.

Speaking at second edition of Huawei’s global Corporate Social Responsibility program, ‘Seeds for the Future’, that aims to nurture local ICT talent, last Friday, he highlighted the importance of developing the ICT and telecommunication sectors’ infrastructure in Sri Lanka.

The Ambassador stressed the need for more investment in the information and telecommunications industry, considering it as a priority area in order to enable digitization and fulfill the set economic goals.

According to the Ambassador, the Chinese government has disbursed Yuan 1.5 billion in aid to Sri Lanka to supplement various development projects and charities during the period 2014-2017.

Every year, Huawei Shenzhen, China, invites students across the global to study at the company headquarters and this year too Huawei presents full scholarships to 10 selected Sri Lankan university students for a two-week study trip from November 4 to 18.

The scholarship winners will also have opportunities to study cutting-edge technologies such as 5G, LTE, and cloud computing, and have hands-on practice at the Huawei headquarters.

This year too, Huawei, joined hands with the Ministry of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure for the launch of this project and Minister Harin Fernando said that ‘Seeds for the Future’ program would support Sri Lanka to be a digitally empowered nation.

“Last year’s study trip enahnced student’s abilities to adopt to the ICT industry as they learned more about state-of-the-art technologies and skills as well as the innovation needs of the Sri Lankan market,” the Minister said.

Initiated by Huawei in 2008, the ‘Seeds For the Future’ program seeks to develop local ICT talent, enhance knowledge transfer and promote a greater understanding of an interest in the telecommunications sector.

Shunli Wang, Chief Executive Officer of Huawei Sri Lanka, also emphasized the need to nurture local ICT talent and expressed hope that the Seeds For the Future program will immensely assist local communities, universities and students and the Sri Lanka ICT industry to a great extent.

He further highlighted that Sri Lanka needs more bandwidth to realize the government’s ambitious target of building a digital Sri Lanka.

According to Wang, despite fiber networks and fast mobile networks, Sri Lanka needs more bandwidth and the biggest challenge the country currently faces is the infrastructure.