Lanka’s ICT exports surpasses US$ 1bn

Sri Lanka’s Digital Literacy has reached 39% and ICT exports have surpassed USS 1 billion making ICT the 5th largest foreign exchange revenue earner.

The ICT sector goal is to attract US$ 5 billion export revenue especially through entrepreneurship, innovation and digital adoption.

In line with the national development priorities and digitization agenda of the Government is geared to provide the benefits of ICT to every citizen in the country a release from the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka said.

Key initiatives include drafting digital legal enablers, namely, the Electronic Transactions Act, the Computer Crimes Act, the Payment Devices Frauds Act and setting up the digital certificate framework for Payment and Settlement Systems Act for the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.

E-Local Government (eLG) is a high demanded solution used in local authorities; Pradeshiya Sabha, Urban Councils and Municipal Councils to capture regular revenue, non-regular revenue and applications such as construction permits.

This year, the ICTA has managed to expand the services of eLG with new features to another 50 local authorities to enhance the quality, efficiency and effectives of service delivery to citizens.

Lanka government network (LGN),initiated under e-Sri Lanka Program, is the underlying information infrastructure backbone (dedicated network) that connects all the government organizations of Sri Lanka in a cost-effective and secure manner.

The LGN 2.0 lunched in 2017 aims to connect 860 government organization in the first phase. At present, 817 Government Locations are successfully connected to the LGN benefiting more than 67,000 government employees. Integrated with Lanka Government Cloud (LGC 2.0) the LGN facilitates access to many eSevices and applications.

Under the Digital Health initiative, the ICTA has digitized 32 hospitals to date and has been able to facilitate informed decision making at the Government Hospitals.

More than 850 “SMART Social Circles” have been established in 25 districts under ICTA’s Citizen Empowerment initiative.

A pool of 8,600 knowledge agents were trained and more than 500 women entrepreneurs were supported under the “Suhuruliya” initiative.

e-Registrar of Companies (e-ROC) is facilitates online Registration of Companies and is live from April 2018. With the system, average time to register a company is reduced to 1 day, which is a main indicator of the “Starting Business Index” of Sri Lanka. With the system, approximately, 40+ new companies register online per day.

Electronic Document Attestation System (eDAS) is a Cloud based service platform that has granted consular division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) to reduce the document processing time significantly.

The eDAS can be accessed by foreign diplomatic missions and Sri Lankan missions abroad for processing of documents and currently serves over 12,500 applicants and process over 30,000 documents monthly. The system facilitates status notifications to customer mobiles via SMS and emails.

Based on successes and lessons learnt from on-going initiatives ICTA has taken measures to introduce new strategies and to make the government services effective and efficient with digital innovations.