5. Women and E-Government Programmes

5.1 eTransformation programmes

As was indicated earlier, the eSri Lanka project was gender neutral in design and there are no programmes that specifically addressed critical needs of women. Of the five eTransformation programmes proposed, the ePensions; eCitizen and eForeign Employment were of direct relevance to women. The ePensions programme benefits retired women employees from the government sector and widows who are eligible to receive a monthly pension, by eliminating processing delays and having the pension credited to the bank account of beneficiaries. The eCitizen project has contributed to the development of the Population Registry and the issue of a unique ID number that can be used across government agencies. This helps in cutting down the number of visits required for entitlements-processing to government offices, which benefits women immensely, by reducing the time they have to spend on accessing entitlements and preventing further stress on their work day, which is already longer than that of men.⁹¹ Considering that over 22 percent of households are women-headed, the tangible benefits for single women and women who are heads of household cannot be discounted.⁹² Further, women are no longer subsumed in the household, as the eCitizen project maintains records for an individual. The eForeign Employment project had potential to benefit women who migrate overseas for work.⁹³ However, as noted earlier, this initiative was discontinued.

5.2 Government Information Centre

The Government Information Centre (GIC) was launched in 2006 as a public/private sector partnership to provide information on government services through a single location using multiple channels. It acts as a digital intermediary through interactive multilingual informational services and web interfaces. Information on 287 organizations and 2500+ services is available from the GIC website. Of the institutions that cater to women’s needs, the GIC website includes contact information for the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs, and the Women’s Bureau of Sri Lanka, but not for the National Committee on Women. A few services are searchable, notably 'making a complaint about rape' and 'infringement of labour laws'. Digital intermediary services are also not available for these three institutions due to the slow uptake of digitization.⁹⁴ However, detailed information is available on the GIC website of the services provided by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) while the intermediary services also direct the caller to the Bureau’s 24-hour hotline.

Up to end January 2016, there were 8.8 million⁹⁵ hits on the GIC website.⁹⁶ While sex disaggregated data is not available in the GIC annual report for 2013, a 2011 study⁹⁷ found that female callers were just 21 percent, during the one-month period from mid December 2010 to mid-January 2011 for which data was available. The majority of callers were public sector and private sector employees, students and entrepreneurs, with informal sector workers and other marginalised groups hardly using the service. Use by Tamil language speakers was also minimal. This could primarily be attributed to the lack of prioritization of e-readiness of the population,⁹⁸ lack of awareness of services among citizens, lack of access to ICT hardware, and the reluctance to use public access venues even if there was awareness.⁹⁹

5.3 Health services

Technology-based service improvements in the health sector are beneficial to women. Some of these include the Hospital Health Information Management System, a communicable disease surveillance and analysis system focusing on quick dissemination of information to respond to outbreak of diseases; e-hospitals; a bilingual medical information portal that contains more than 2000 authenticated medical related articles in Sinhala and Tamil language; and a trilingual content portal which provides high quality information on first aid.

The current focus is the registration of all patients; capturing the discharge diagnosis and streamlining data collection processes of maternal and child health and immunization; and the pilot testing of a unique identifier, the Personal Health Number (PHN), which will allow for continuity of care and life-long health records, leading to the capture of number of patients as opposed to episodes. Women, who are also responsible for children and the aged in the family, benefit from a reduction in waiting time; access to hassle-free services; and availability of past medical history in the system, which eliminates the necessity of remembering details or preserving records of previous conditions.

5.4 Reproductive health

The Happy Life service of the Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka¹⁰⁰ provides sexual and reproductive health (SRH) knowledge and awareness, particularly among youth, and the opportunity to discuss SRH issues in confidence. Counselling services are accessible through multiple channels. In 2014, approximately 70 per cent of an approximate 15,000 users of the services were males who were using the service for themselves as well as on behalf of their spouse or partner. This raises the question of how this service is addressing gender power relations in negotiating access to reproductive health.