Designing e-Government for the Poor - Tanzania Development ...

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Sri Lanka
Title: E-land services
Proposer: Mr. W. K. Wasantha Deshapriya, Head, Reengineering
Government Programme, Information and Communication
Technology Agency
Country: Sri Lanka
Date: March 2005
I. INTRODUCTION
In November 2002, the Government of Sri Lanka, launched “e-Sri
Lanka” as a national development initiative, with the objective of using
information and communication technology (ICT) to foster social integration,
peace, economic growth and poverty reduction. The principal development
outcomes of “e-Sri Lanka” are anticipated to be: (i) more effective,
citizen-centred, and transparent government; (ii) empowerment of the rural
poor, women and youth through increased and affordable access to information
and communication tools; (iii) developed leadership and skills in ICT;
and (iv) employment creation through the ICT industry, ICT-enabled services,
and enhanced competitiveness of user industries and services.
Re-engineering Government is one of the main programme areas of
the Information and Communications Agency (ICTA), which aims to improve
the efficiency of delivery and access mechanisms of the government.
The objectives of the Re-engineering Government Programme are mainly to
be achieved by reengineering the government business processes, and
enabling those processes with ICT. The programme also prioritized all
citizen services that are provided by the Government of Sri Lanka in order
to identify the possible e-services. From the 12 short listed citizen services,
four services have been selected to become e-services
In addition to e-services, the Reengineering Government Programme
will implement a number of enabling projects which will provide the
fundamental requirements necessary for successfully implementing e-services.
These projects would interconnect the government, fulfill minimum ICT
requirements of the government, provide a supporting application platform to
deploy e-services, build the ICT capacity of public officers, fulfill policy
standards and security requirements of the government, and ensure the Web
presence of the government to provide information and services.
II. ISSUES
The rural sector is inherently linked to agriculture. The scarcity of
land and water are two major problems faced by rural farmers. The
absence of a proper land titling service aggravates the situation because a
title is the most accepted collateral for agricultural loans, crop insurance
etc. An additional challenge is that a multitude of separate government
organizations are responsible for matters relating to land. Therefore, the