Officials who underwent the training in basic ICT were from Colombo District Secretariat, 13 Divisional Secretariats, Registrar General's Department, Pension Department and Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Services Ministry, she said further.
We have consistently allocated resources to reach these levels. If you look at the rest of the world, not many countries can boast about a healthy literacy of their population. In the South Asian region, we have the best along with Maldives.
Read more: Sri Lanka: ICT literacy: a must for a developing nation
Improvements: This programme pursues major and sustainable improvements in the Government of Sri Lanka’s (GOSL) efficiency, transparency, effectiveness, and quality of services. For this purpose, it will reinforce and expand fundamental governance and public management reforms as a complement and enabler of required solutions.
Read more: e-Sri Lanka: Prof. V.K. Samaranayake’s lasting legacy
The focus of the program is to achieve a customer-oriented model of governance with “one-stop service” delivery mechanisms and under this model, citizens are able to receive government services at a “single window” of the government, rather than running around numerous government agencies, Ms. Ishii said.
Read more: World Bank to implement e-governance in Sri Lanka
The critical success factor in becoming citizen centric is to understand citizens’ needs based on their intentions (i.e. fundamental life objectives that are meaningful to citizens and businesses) as opposed to focusing purely on products and services the government offers. For example, a common set of needs for most citizens would include birth, death and marriage registration. If the different government agencies collaborate to provide the information through one integrated portal, it would be an effective means of enticing more citizens to use eGovernment services.