Tag Archives: Sri Lanka
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Rural BPO at Mahavilachchiya: Still taxiing…
December 25 was just another working day at OnTime Technologies at Mahavilachchiya and things were going on at full throttle when I stepped-in to this rural BPO, arguably the first such initiative in Sri Lanka.
Here is the good and bad news.
Good news: The wheels are still in motion. Unlike most of the ICT4D projects (especially [...]
5th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
The tsunami occurred within three months of LIRNEasia’s founding. We were lucky. No one in LIRNEasia was directly affected, though there were several “what ifs”. It changed our research program for sure. We did three projects directly connected to the tsunami: NEWS:SL which was a study on how Sri Lanka [...]
Agricultural price information through mobiles: Harsha’s dream closer to realization
LIRNEasia’s Lead Economist Harsha de Silva had a dream. It was that information would reduce price volatility and waste in agricultural markets and that both consumers and producers would benefit from better functioning markets. Unlike Jensen who studied the effects of price information communicated through mobiles on the market for “wild” fish and [...]
Tsunami coverage that includes mentions of LIRNEasia
The pictures that keep coming up on the right-hand side of the blog are for the most part those of the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. So we are not allowed to forget. Not that we want to.
But anyway, Newsweek was the first to publish something with a quote [...]
Sri Lanka: Service sector cushions job losses in agriculture & manufacturing
More food for thought for discussions on whether the emphasis should be on agriculture, which is said to employ the most people, or on services, which has the most potential.
Sri Lanka has generated 234,000 service sector jobs in the third quarter of 2009 from a year earlier, though 89,000 jobs were lost in industry, and [...]
KF Lai and Ashok Jhunjhunwala seed entrepreneurship in Colombo
When e Sri Lanka was designed, we thought that lots of jobs would be created, some through conventional firms in the IT and IT enabled service industries, but more in entrepreneurial startups. The first hope was realized more or less, but not the latter.
Since two people with direct experience, LIRNEasia international advisory [...]
Stuart Weinstein at government early warning offices
Lakshaman Bandaranayake of Vanguard Management, who worked with LIRNEasia closely in the post-tsunami period, was kind enough to arrange meetings for Stuart Weinstein of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center who attended the LIRNEasia@5 conference.
For those who may not know, Stuart was at the controls on December 26, 2004 when the great earthquake that [...]
Innovative organizations
Given we’ve just finished celebrating LIRNEasia’s fifth anniversary, I could not but notice a rather striking compliment in a piece published to mark the death anniversary of Professor Cyril Ponnamperuma, a great Sri Lankan who gave me my first job , post-PhD. The author, Nalaka Gunawardene, is a person we partner with on occasion [...]
Learnings on the use of ICT for agriculture
Mobile phone message services like one deployed by the financial news agency Reuters to over a million farmers in India, could help Sri Lankan farmers earn more for their produce, experts said.
Ranjit Pawar of Reuters Market Light, India said their SMS (short message service) in India provide farmers timely information and helps eliminate middlemen.
“A farmer [...]
News generated at the LIRNEasia@5 conference
We didn’t quite think we’d be generating news at the conference, but apparently some of what was said was truly newsworthy.
Capital investment in Sri Lanka’s telecom infrastructure has plummeted amid a price war and high taxation which will crimp expansion in the future and broadband roll out in the island, top telecom operators [...]
Contribution of policy research is the avoidance of bad decisions
More coverage on LBO of the proceedings of the LIRNEasia@5 conference:
“The biggest contribution from research is not what is adopted, but what is adopted,” says Bill Melody, founding director of World Dialog on Regulation for Network Economies.
“Harmful policies that are avoided with the information generated from research.”
R K Arnold the head of the executive secretariat [...]
Coverage of inaugural session of the LIRNEasia@5 conference
Professor Xue Lan of Tsinghua University in Beijing participated in the inaugural session of the La@5 conference through a video link, kindly provided by Tata Communications Lanka. We were worried about this, because he was competing with real people (Milinda Moragoda, Minister of Justice and Law Reforms, Sri Lanka, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Center [...]
Railway reservations through mobiles in Sri Lanka
In December 2009, Sri Lanka Railways will launch a service that will allow the making of railway reservations using mobiles. We congratulate the past and present management of the Railways for taking this innovative step in an otherwise hidebound organization. We are sure they had to overcome some very serious administrative barriers in [...]
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