Maneshka Boram, GPJ Sri Lanka
In 2013, Isham Mohamed conceived of #StopDengue, an app to provide information and news alerts about the disease, but was unable to find funding to develop it. He has put his innovation on hold while he focuses on a career at a private software company.
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA — Isham Mohamed has almost given up on his dreams.
In 2013, the 25-year-old information technology graduate started work on an app named #StopDengue which would send news alerts, statistics and other updates on dengue prevalence in Sri Lanka to smartphones and computers via push notifications. Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease, which infected nearly 30,000 people in Sri Lanka in 2015 alone.
In April 2014, Mohamed was shortlisted as one of 20 finalists at the Microsoft YouthSpark Challenge for Change, an annual competition.
But, Mohamed says, that was as far as he got. He didn’t have the money to actually develop the app.
“Despite approaching various IT and software development companies in the country I was not able to get funding,” he says.
Mohamed, who is from Akkaraipattu on the east coast of Sri Lanka, says his family couldn’t finance his dream. And he doesn’t want to borrow money from friends or a bank, because he’s not sure if #StopDengue will earn him enough money to pay it back.
When he finished his studies at Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka in March 2014, Mohamed took a job as a software engineer at a Colombo IT firm.
He’s not alone. Sri Lanka has a growing IT industry, but young software engineers say their spirit of innovation is threatened because it’s too hard to find money to establish start-ups. With no money for entrepreneurs, many recent college grads opt for high-paying jobs at established firms.
“I know many youth who are struggling as we are, having to support ourselves,” says Sanjeev Chandrasekaran, 24, who failed to find money for his start-up. “Many are not able to turn down six-figure salaries that are being offered.”
The concerns Mohamed and Chandrasekaran share seem at odds with explosive growth in Sri Lanka’s software development sector. The country earned $628 million in 2014 from the export of computer and information services, according to the Ministry of Finance’s Annual Report 2014. Eight years before, in 2006, that revenue was $98 million.
And the number of jobs in that industry has grown, too, from 50,159 in 2010 to 75,107 in 2013, and it was expected to grow to 82,854 in 2014, according to the National ICT Workforce Survey, published by the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka in 2013.
Sri Lanka-based companies have created software and IT products used globally, including algorithm-based software which powers many popular travel and tourism sites, as well as the online trading system for the London Stock Exchange. And a Sri Lankan firm was behind Bahrain’s e-government portal.
Despite those successes, tech start-ups get support, entrepreneurs say.
Chandrasekaran and four friends created Cobweb IO, a platform that aids communication between smart devices, in 2015 while they were students at the University of Colombo School of Computing. The group self-funded a beta version of the application and presented it at IoT Asia 2015 held in Singapore, in a bid to attract private investors. The app received a lot of positive feedback, Chandrasekaran says, but the group didn’t come home with any money.
They have temporarily stopped work on their software until they can raise the needed funding for the next stage of development, Chandrasekaran says.
Part of the problem is that tech innovators need to develop their business models, says Vishaka Nanayakkara, senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Moratuwa.
“Many local university students do not take up part-time jobs which can help them gain a better business sense,” she says. “As a result, many of my students today do not even know what a balance sheet is.”
Another issue is that banks and other potential lenders don’t value unrealized tech innovations, says Suren Kannangara, the CEO of Affno Asia Pacific (Pvt) Ltd. Kannangara’s company created the mobile government platform for Bahrain, enabling the country to provide over a hundred services via mobile phone.
“Our main asset is our ideas, but this is not something that is recognized by traditional financial institutions in Sri Lanka,” he says.
And Sri Lankan clients aren’t always willing to test new ideas, Kannangara says.
In 2014, Affno developed an idea to build an online ship registry portal, which would cut down on processing time for ships entering ports and ensure all payments and information was centralized.
The company first approached Sri Lanka’s government agencies with this idea, hoping it could be funded for use in the Colombo port, he says.
“When I approached local authorities with the same service I was turned down as they believed they could not fund it,” he says.
His company went on to build this system for Bahrain, Kannangara says.
Sri Lankan officials say few tech innovators apply for support that’s available to them.
The Sri Lanka Inventors Commission has received very few funding applications from IT innovators, says Commissioner Mahesh Edirisinghe. In 2015, the commission received just 14 funding applications for IT innovations.
Even so, Edirisinghe says, the commission is making changes to provide more support to innovators. “Earlier we thought of IT as a tool to help innovation,” he says. “But going forward, IT has now been recognized as a main category of invention.”
The Sri Lankan government is also making IT innovation and development a priority he says, citing several proposals included in the 2016 budget. Those proposals include an Innovation Accelerator program that would combine the services of government agencies involved in tech development.
Under one budgetary proposal, a center will be set up to manage a fund for the program and will receive 100 million rupees ($691,800) in seed capital and 3 billion rupees ($20.75 million) within three years.
Edirisinghe acknowledges that government agencies in Sri Lanka need to adapt to and keep up with the changing needs of IT innovators in the country.
“I believe there may be a difference in the support we provide and the support that is actually needed by the inventors,” he says.
There’s also new assistance for funding.
The Sri Lanka Inventors Commission introduced a program named Invent 2015, to facilitate funding, Edirisinghe says. Selected proposals will be developed to include business and marketing plans, and innovators will be introduced to potential funders.
“We will focus in changing this thinking in 2016 to ensure that innovators, including IT innovators, do not get discouraged and the value of an idea is understood and accepted in society,” Edirisinghe says.
For young innovators like Mohamed and Chandrasekaran, that would be welcome news indeed.
Maneshka Borham, GPJ, translated one interview from Sinhala.
