The Sri Lanka Export Development Board has held an SME Awareness Creation Forum at the Trincomalee District Secretariat, aimed at steering small and medium enterprises in the district towards export markets.
The forum was held on 1 October, Hiru News and the Daily FT reported. The EDB operates under the Ministry of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development.
Three components
The programme ran in three parts. An awareness seminar briefed entrepreneurs on EDB services and on export market requirements, with case histories from the fruit and vegetable, processed food, handicraft and lifestyle, and fisheries sectors. A mini exhibition showed exportable products from those sectors alongside stakeholder institutions and established export companies. A business clinic put EDB officials and public and private sector stakeholders in front of individual entrepreneurs to work through specific obstacles and on meeting international product standards.
Trincomalee was selected in line with what the EDB describes as strategic export development priorities, with the emphasis on drawing fisheries and marine products, agricultural products and tourism-related enterprises into export value chains. The forum sits within the Board’s regional outreach programme under the National Export Development Plan, and was also used to raise awareness of the New Exporter Development Programme among government officials and trade chambers.
Nine such forums have been held nationwide since 2017, the EDB said — the most recent before this one in Batticaloa in February 2025, a gap of some twenty months.
The minister’s case for the district
Industry and Entrepreneurship Development Minister Sunil Handunnetti addressed the gathering, arguing that Trincomalee’s advantages are underused: a natural harbour he described as unlike any other in the world, a large extent of land still not taken up for industry, and mineral resources at Kokkilai, Pudavakattu and Pulmoddai and offshore.
He said completion of the Colombo–Dambulla expressway would leave Eastern Province districts holding the infrastructure, employment base and land that industry requires, and urged that large ambitions be approached by starting as small businesses and working collectively.
Also present were Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Employment Arun Hemachandra, Trincomalee District MP Roshan Akmeemana, District Secretary Hemantha Kumara, EDB Chairman and Chief Executive Mangala Wijesinghe, Eastern Province Rural Industries Provincial Director Riswani Rifas, EDB Director of Regional Development D. M. P. Dissanayake, divisional secretaries, exporters and entrepreneurs.
A note on the sourcing
Both reports carry the same text and both are attributed to the EDB. This is a Board press release published by two newsrooms, not two independent accounts of the event, and the figures and characterisations in it — including the count of nine forums and the strategic rationale for selecting Trincomalee — are the EDB’s own. No independent assessment of attendance, of the district’s export base, or of what earlier forums produced was available to this desk.
Neither filing says how many entrepreneurs attended, names any participating company, or gives a target for how many export-ready firms the Board expects to identify in Trincomalee.
