The Asian Development Bank has retained the consultancy MTI Consulting to design a proposed academy for training Sri Lanka’s public-sector workforce in digital skills, following a competitive national tender.
The firm will draw up the strategy, institutional framework, business plan and curriculum for the planned Academy for Digital Transformation of the Public Sector, which would sit under GovTech Sri Lanka, Lanka Business Online reported.
The academy is envisaged as a national platform for building the digital capabilities of state employees, supporting the skills needed to accelerate digital government and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) across the public sector.
What officials said
Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, Chief Advisor to the President on the Digital Economy and Chairman of GovTech, said the academy “is expected to provide a structured and scalable platform to build the digital capabilities needed across government, enabling us to effectively leverage emerging digital infrastructure and services.”
Hilmy Cader, Chief Executive of MTI Consulting and the project’s mentor, said digital transformation “cannot be achieved through conventional training alone,” and that the academy “needs to build the practical capabilities required to translate digital strategies and technologies into sustained institutional outcomes.”
Context
GovTech Sri Lanka, which sits under the Ministry of Digital Economy, is the government’s lead implementer for national digital transformation, working with state institutions on digital capability and service delivery.
The announcement follows a series of digital-government moves this month. In November the same agency was named in a proposed US-backed programme to build a sovereign government cloud and expand national computing capacity, with the Australian firm CyberCX named as implementing partner. The ADB is separately a lender across several Sri Lankan programmes, including a $98 million digital transformation loan reported earlier this month.
MTI Consulting describes itself as an international strategy consultancy that has completed more than 760 projects across 56 countries over 29 years.
Not reported
The filing gives no value for the ADB contract, no timeline for when the academy would open, no intake size or target number of officials to be trained, and no indication of where it would be housed or who would accredit its qualifications. It does not say which other bidders took part in the tender, nor whether the academy has Cabinet approval or a budget line.
Sourcing note
This report rests on a single verified newsroom, and the filing reads as a corporate announcement rather than independent reporting: it carries quotes from the government’s digital chairman and from the consultancy that won the work, but no third-party assessment and no figures. No other verified Sri Lankan outlet had carried the item when this article was written — a keyword sweep of the Daily Mirror, EconomyNext, NewsFirst and Hiru rails returned nothing on the academy. Readers should treat the described scope as the parties’ stated intention, not as a programme already established.
