Economic benefits of Digital inclusion to Sri Lanka - By Thanzyl Thajudeen

Digital Inclusion: Strategic perspective

This article I wrote consist of so much of benefits when the whole digital sphere is seriously and strategically considered and implemented; it brings in so much of economical benefits – but moreover, it’s social, increasingly health & well being and environmental & sustainability benefits to Sri Lanka’s economy. I am a marketer and strategist but yet I play as a voice of an economist too when it comes to the digital and social media spheres. Below are the benefits clearly from an economic point of view.

Many executives I come across state that digital and social media has not hit the grounds in Sri Lanka; but the reality is that it has – but has reached on a promotional perspective.

Many brands and organizations have mis-used the whole digital sphere, increasingly the social media sphere especially taking Facebook into account. The government along with many public and private sectors has not educated and outlined the benefits and trigger the community at first place. From the beginning, it has been used as a quick and easy way of increasing short term bottom line, immature PR articles on papers, and ultimately ending up in a promotional game – this is completely the fault of the so called brands and organizations. It needs to clearly have a branding in place; not promotions. The so called members of the IT community in Sri Lanka needs to educate and make stakeholders understand the macro, meso and the micro impacts of thinking Digital on a strategic perspective.

Overview

Digital technologies’ including the massive internet is playing a major role in today’s global economy; increasingly many government owned and private sectors are investing considerably in these technologies. Digital inclusion to Sri Lanka’s economy has many direct and indirect benefits and impacts the GDP and other measures of economic welfare positively – even other areas such as social, health and environmental impacts.

Increasingly other countries are beginning to recognize and measure the percentage contribution to their economy’s GDP from the whole digital inclusion context – I am pretty sure economists in Sri Lanka so far has no measurements or even consider doing this – It’s not just about the telecommunications and internet service providers contribution to GDP, but I’m talking about the overall inclusion in digital activities and initiatives. When it comes to measuring this sort of value could be really hard; but ultimately it’s about finding techniques and processes when it comes to defining market and non-market values for this area.

The fire ball as I call

I would say that when Sri Lanka whether it’s the public or the private sector really think of increasing access and initiatives to implement digital technologies and internet in households, not just carrying out short term programmes as I have noticed, will improve education and employment in the country, and increasingly individuals will have more qualifications and this improves their earnings and the ease of finding employment; it will improve health and well being among the community whereby increasing access to improved health information and health services to public; it will increase savings for public service providers enabled by greater use of online information and transactional services; and finally it will benefit the consumers who will stand a better position to be able to purchase a wider range of products at lower price.

Improved education, skills and employment

Let us take a look at the children firstly. Increasing usage of ICT for education and introducing digital reporting to parents (such as results and attendances for example) will obviously lead to increasing numbers of qualifications taken, along with increasing level of confidence in this area, and engaging parents at every level, and decrease the student base who are excluded from this ground of education. What is the outcome of this? Well, Sri Lanka could experience higher quality in employment; increasing levels of lifetime earnings, and increasing social and networking skills whilst reducing truancy costs. But the only downturn which needs to be watched carefully and managed is when children log onto inappropriate contents or increasingly online bullying as I notice. Bringing in a case study here, NotSchool.net project provides learning opportunities for young people excluded from mainstream education – to date 5,000 young people have benefited from NotSchool.net and all outcomes outlined above has been evidenced and achieved. Think of increasing levels of education and training for disabled people – shouldn’t a program be initiated for this in the country strategically, not just carrying out international affiliations that in the end do nothing in Sri Lanka.

When it comes to adults, it’s just the same – Sri Lankan could increase the uptakes on training and education, online job search for example, and increasing access to telecommuting. The output of this is the same with increasing levels of employment and choices and moreover, adults will have the confidence of helping children with homework. The outcome is similar to those I have stated for children but the beauty is that there will be increasing support in children’s attainment & edutainment.

When taking those employed in public and private sectors, digital technologies is of course a strategic tool when it comes to increasing efficiency and productivity, and ultimately, higher earnings and bottom line driven results. Think about the unemployed? This digital inclusion could increase employment prospects, other opportunities and enhance skills. This could really break those unemployed who face so much of barriers such as low skills, low self-esteem and confidence, physical and mental health issues, etc.

The economic benefits of all these would be increase in earnings and productivity – if you put this in economic terms, increasing levels of additional GVA. This also leaves out welfare costs from the government and could experience significant levels of increasing skilled and working crowd in Sri Lanka.

Improved health and well-being standards

Increasingly in Sri Lanka, we experience an ageing population which calls the government, public and private sector organizations to increase health and well-being in the community. The activities I would recommend are to carry out and increase access to health information and moreover, the services provided. This increases access to records of personal health information, increasing levels in healthy literacy and awareness, and moreover, giving the right kind of information at the right time. Users then have a much better choice in health related services; and the ability to search and find health service providers at ease; manage and reschedule services, personalizing personal health, and increasingly the time taken would be faster. This would also make users accessing care in the appropriate setting which is increasingly an important area to consider in Sri Lanka. In a way it reduces user traffic and waiting in long queues at hospitals and clinics; it actually reduces demand for General Practitioners in the medical field but yet, there needs to be mechanisms to balance and manage this.

Bringing the outcome of all these into place – it’s highly conclusive that there will be increased levels in effective decision making when it comes to accessing health information and services, increase in users’ involvement, increased confidence in appropriate level of care, increased levels in avoiding illnesses and diseases which Sri Lanka is facing significantly at current, detecting early indications of any illnesses, increased attendance rates, a much better capacity utilization in health services, increased home access to health services whereby reducing the demand for hospital beds, costs of accessing services and boosts greater efficiency overall.

The impact this will have in Sri Lanka’s economy, taking from the general public or the users’ point of view, are avoiding unnecessary health service costs, improving the overall quality of health and life, higher levels of personal satisfaction, increased efficiency in health service usage, and time saving and lower transaction costs. If we talk about the providers giving these services, they would benefit from avoiding wasteful health service costs, increased levels of productivity and efficiency, and increasingly the motive and satisfaction to improve and balance the quality of lives of the people.

Taking a practical case here, think of NHS (National Health Services) in the UK – NHS Choices is the leading provider of online health information and is the digital gateway and public front door to the NHS. NHS Choices provides online access to information on over 750 conditions and treatments as well as a wide-range of healthy lifestyle advice.

And as Sri Lanka is also facing increased levels of obesity throughout children and teens, it’s more viable to have these information and services provided to combat this issue through the usage of digital channels and technologies. Sri Lanka really needs to enable people to access their health information and retrieve services comfortably and appropriately, and deliver treatments remotely as there are so much of illnesses and diseases that need to be combated in rural and other parts of the country.

Government and Citizens’ benefit from service transformation

Taking the Government in Sri Lanka for example, it could benefit significantly in terms of reduced costs of providing services. When the government thinks and acts on digital inclusion taking from a strategic point of view, that is by providing information and transacting with citizens on the digital platform, it could achieve greater levels in dematerialization savings and lessen the time spent, along with reducing transaction costs, reducing errors and unnecessary re-work jobs, making the quality of data better and easier to analyze, reducing the demand for face to face contacts, and most of all FTE savings.

What happens here is that it increases education and health outcomes, increased efficiency in the public sector, increased levels when taking job satisfaction of these civil servants, increased accuracy in service intervention, increased tax revenues, and avoid costs of major expensive channels. This would also mean that there is a scope for economies of scale taking a financial perspective, and scope for flexible working and information sharing if taking a non-financial perspective.

The only challenge here I see is that the difficulty in serving when it comes to a non-user who have no idea about how to use these digital technologies, even the internet – but yet again, we go to the first point where I stated about increased levels of ICT education, training and employment which increases the literacy and access in this area. This ultimately increases efficiency throughout the public sector, and boosts up a more accurate and efficient policy making.

When coming to the citizens’ point of view, information gathering and transactions with the public sector increases which saves a lot of time and gives many education and health benefits whilst keeping administrative and transactions costs at its lowest, and reduce error rates and requirements for multiple contacts. This makes the citizens better informed about what is owed to them and what they owe with increasing levels of satisfaction with the government services.

This would reduce costs of transmitting information from a financial perspective, and increased choice, convenience, information, personalization, engagement if taking a non-financial perspective. The economic impact we could experience here is that there will be increased levels of trust with the public sector, and increased participation and higher engagement levels.

Increased online shopping for consumers

As we all know there is very low levels of online purchasing when it comes to Sri Lanka, probably due to security, privacy and unwanted promotions that are thrown out from the banking and financial sector – most importantly, what we need to consider here is to educate and increase literacy and confidence when it comes to online commerce not just enhancing your bank’s product portfolio or services which I could conclude is the case with Sri Lankan financial sector.

We need to think about the consumers that are the general public – being socially responsible than being too much internal oriented. When it comes to think about digital inclusion, it gives consumers access to a global network of potential suppliers – may it be from the largest household names through to the smallest niche retailers that we can find in our local markets.

This increases levels of consumer choice, and gives space for increasing levels of fair competition. People are increasingly turning out to search engines and price comparison sites so that they could reduce the time and cost spent finding goods and services and enable consumers to compare products – this is still not the case with Sri Lanka although we experience a very niche doing it.

This would not only increase efficiency with which buyers and sellers are matched – it also drives price competition. This can generate significant savings for consumers. This area have been bombarded with too much of mis-trust and mis-promotions mostly those from the private sector.

Conclusion

Taking all the benefits outlined above, we could see that it increases home access for children, improves ICT skills for the employed, increased choices of employment for those who are unemployed, government efficiencies, and of course online shopping. For Sri Lanka to be a truly civil and democratic society providing everyone with equal opportunity to education, training, health, employment and equal access to communication tools then the immediate action is to run successful programs to those who are excluded in the digital area as well as other disadvantaged communities, and secure the requisite funding to do so.

Giving out tools and information that most Sri Lankans enjoy is fundamental to creating a fair and equitable society. Yet beyond the question of fairness, there is a clear economic imperative for doing so as stated in every corner of this article. I would state that Sri Lanka needs a Task Force for Digital Inclusion.

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Economic benefits of Digital inclusion to Sri Lanka