Notes from the World Bank seminar “e-Sri Lanka: Transforming a Nation with ICT” in Washington.
The E-Sri Lanka initiative, which became effective in January 2005 is one of the pioneering ICT for Development projects supported by the World Bank. This ambitious e-development project aims to bring connectivity to rural populations, improve the way government operates and raise awareness of the benefits of ICT for remote rural populations as well as support the development of a vibrant private ICT sector. The leadership team from Sri Lanka’s ICT Agency presents the original E-Sri Lanka vision and emerging lessons and key results after the first four years of implementation experience.
Key talking points:
Where does Sri Lanka stand?
Network Readiness Index (NRI) presentation, shows high percentages of ICT Literacy and Governmental readiness for ICT.
Some examples:
Information on any Government Process, Service or Application just a phone call away
Civil Registration (Birth, Marriage, Death certificates etc.) documents in hand within a matter of minutes
Drive-in Vehicle / Revenue License Registration
Government Organizational Machinery (Ministries, Departments etc.) connected, on-line and secure
Single-window, multi-channel access to any e-service in Sri Lanka (very soon)
Figures for Industry and Education show:
30,000+ new jobs created in the IT/BPO sector since 2005
IT/ITeS becomes the 5th largest foreign exchange earner for the country – USD 250+ million in 2008
2009 – Declared as the “Year of English and IT”
2000 schools equipped with computer labs (6000 by 2010/11)
Increased access to ICT for citizens across the country - 600 Nenasalas (Tele-centres) set-up
Provision of Market Prices & Crop/Agriculture information to farmers
Providing e-health/tele-medicine facilities to rural patients
Development of digital talking books for the visually impaired, to developing visual hearing aids for the hearing impaired
Availability of supplementary school educational material both at primary and secondary educational level to students.
Setting up of rural BPOs and creation of job opportunities for youth in rural communicates
How did this happen?
Answer lies in the implementation of structural grids in the society:
Infrastructure-, e-Governance-, Knowledge-, Industry- and Rural grid.
Infrastructure grid examples:
Nenasala - knowledge centers. Both public and private ownership: entrpreneurs, religious institutions, community based organizations, rural schools and public libraries.
NBN - National Backbone Network. Objective: Deployment of affordable broadband services throughout Sri Lanka:
Island-wide Ultra High Bandwidth Broadband Backbone
Provision of affordable broadband connectivity to all parts of the country
Lanka Government Network - Objective: Highly available, secure backbone to connect the government.
Rural grid examples:
e-Society Development Initiative (e-SDI):
Seeks to spread the benefits of ICT to disadvantaged communities
Solicit issues and ideas from communities, build their capacity
Help them implement ICT projects to solve their most pressing issues
175 communities have had 175 sustainable ICT centers established, with over 72,00 people benefiting each month
e-Sri Lanka Vision: “Take the dividends of ICT to every village, citizen, business and also transform the way government thinks and works”.
Q&Asession
Viewers of the webcast sent in their questions via Twitter (hashtag: #eSL09), and via a videolink
Wamuyu (twitter):
- Any study that shows that students exposed to ICT education have performed better than students who have not?
- Did Sri Lanka begin with a single e-Transactions law that was later split up into computer crime, copyright and e-Signature or did Sri Lanka enact all the specific laws separately? How did the country get consensus from the various Ministries?
lpant (twitter):
- Have for-profit entrepreneurship models been more successful than community dev ventures or state-sponsored, funded models?
- About ICTs’ role to break status quo. Specifically I am interested on enabling role of ICTs to facilitate governance innovation, social innovation and institutional change. I am wondering if the speaker can talk about specific experience about this from the projects in Sri Lanka.
- When the speaker was talking about the LGN he mentiones that all gov organization will be connected , on what level this connection?
Video link from Rwanda, Moldova, Tanzania:
-Can the e-gov become a common denominator and contribute to international cooperation?
All the questions can be viewed on the eDevelopment Twitter page. The webcast will be archived and made available on the e-Development website. Facts presented above are collected from the seminar slideshow presentation. To learn more about e-Sri Lanka program, visit: www.ictalk.lk
The International Journal of ICT Research and Development in Africa (IJICTRDA) is a new journal on research, advanced analytical methods and techniques, leading e-innovations, and development policies in information and communication technology adoption and diffusion in Africa and around the globe.
Topics that will be covered in the journal include ICT applications in agriculture and rural development, agribusiness supply chain management, coordination and integration, food security, poverty alleviation, food and agricultural marketing linkages, and rural financial service delivery.
The Editor-in-Chief currently invites authors to consider submitting articles to be featured in the inaugural issue of the journal. Articles may report on empirical research investigations, theoretical frameworks, case studies and major trends in ICT applications in food and agriculture, and rural development.
Being member of the Editorial Advisory Board of IJICTRDA, I’m especially looking forward to seeing submissions on case studies with an emphasis on interaction design and the design process in general. We will also cover published articles on this weblog, once the first journal is out.
It deals with the example of Sri Lanka, where integrated e-development and e-government programs were put into place - e-Sri Lanka. The lessons learned after four years of experience will be the topic of this seminar.
Since the grand opening of our documentary at the Schikaneder Kino in Vienna, we have been busy distributing it through different channels. Several cinema screenings are already planned, and we’re promoting it to film festivals around the world. Confirmed screenings and dates will be published on our Hello Africa Wiki page.
The movie is released under a Creative Commons license, so it is available for anybody to watch and distribute for free. There is a online version up on Vimeo (488 views as of today), from there you can either stream it online, or download as a .mp4 file if you scroll down the page. Another option is to download a high-quality version on Mininova (705 downloads so far), where it’s featured as a high-speed torrent. This is a .ISO DVD file, 1.56 GB in size, which can be burned directly onto a DVD, or played within a media player of choice. Just grab the torrent file and download it with your favourite torrent client.
Since last week we also began to publish informational video snippets out of the movie, on our YouTube account. The video clips are putting the different uses of mobile phones into context and explaining some of the buzzwords as seen in the movie. We also have a lot of interesting clips that didn’t make it into the final edit, they will all be shown here, so keep an eye open.
This post is part of a series of interviews collected at this years conference Coop 2.0 in Gijon.
Ismael Peña-López is lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia and an important contributor to the ICT4D scene. On his blog ICTlogy he publishes his own research and covers conferences and events he attends.
Personally speaking he influenced me very much in writing my thesis and it’s always enjoyable to read through his posts. We also met several times at events and are currently collaborating on an ICT4D calendar project.
In the video you can hear him talking about his two lives concerning ICT4D and his PdH thesis dealing with e-Readiness.
Last week our students had to present a conference paper as part of their HCI class activities. The slides below are based on the paper “Mobile Digital Storytelling in a Developmental Context” by David Frohlich et al., which was presented at CHI this year.
The paper describes a field study that was conducted in an Indian village, where people received mobile camera phones to record non-textual stories, which were also presented on a village display.
Study participants rated the stories they created regarding their motivation, which was distributed between relevance for the community and personal interest. They further stated that most of the stories were created to be viewed by friends and family. Many of the stories were shown on the village display and often large groups of 15-20 people gathered around the 17″ monitor to watch stories.
In their study, which was organised in collaboration with local NGOs they discovered two different types of content and uses for custom mobile storytelling. On the one hand it can be used to help local organisations in creating and sharing information more easily, involving local people in the process. On the other hand they suggest that mass mobile storytelling applications could be deployed on a larger scale to create local cultural libraries. These libraries could complement conventional books, being represented as spoken word and video, instead of written text. Their vision is that stories could be checked out from the distance and played on mobile or public displays.
What I found most interesting when reading the paper was the high use of the public village display. This really shows the potential of such displays for shared communication in developing contexts. I doubt that similar uses of public displays would be emerge in the western world.
The complete paper is available from the ACM library.
Yesterday I received the very nice first impression of the pimped up theme of ICT4D.at done by Oliver Ruhm (Wohnzimmer, Büro für Gestaltung). We agreed on some changes on the layout mostly following Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, March 30, 2009 “Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities” and some smaller usablity bugs we found while analizing the statistics. So below you can see the first ideas ideas Oliver came up. Feel free to leave your comment.
Two speakers of Denmark and Austria respectively talked about the history and current state of development cooperation in Denmark and Austria. Denmark is a front-runner in this respect, whereas Austria since years misses the target of spending 0,7 percent of it’s GDP. Of course the economic crisis isn’t helping efforts of Austrian development organizations as well.
There were some interesting points, but regrettably generally it wasn’t very interactive and discussion was limited to three questions at the end of the panel.
Food and drinks afterwards were good though and also the real conversations happened then.
We talked to both speakers from Austria - Anton Mair from the ministry of exterior and Gerald Hödl from the University of Vienna.
What we found out from Mr. Mair was that the EZA department at the ministry has no dedicated money for ICT4D, but there are some possibilities for innovative projects.
Talking to Mr. Hödl was very interesting and we will stay in touch considering ICT4D inputs to traditional development studies - he is responsible for the curriculum. A cooperation with development studies would be a really great thing as we all come mostly from the technology side and lack the theoretical backgound.
We talked to some more people about our work - and generally was really interesting to see all the people who are situated more in the traditional sector of development cooperation.
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After our first Stammtisch on 18. April and the screening of our movie Hello Africa - which was kind of a replacement for a Stammtisch - we want to announce the second Stammtisch-meeting of ICT4D.at.
