Shiran Fernando, who was an economist and advisor for over a decade, was appointed Chief Executive of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce in May 2026. Following two years of 5% growth, he says Sri Lanka’s economy is no longer as fragile as it was after the 2022 economic crisis and sovereign debt default.
The Ceylon Chamber of Commerce is a business chamber with the widest representation among Sri Lanka’s medium and large private sector enterprises. To accelerate economic growth, its new boss lays out three immediate priorities: targeted sector reforms, building the foundation for AI readiness, and climate financing. On the first of these, he’s direct. “To get the economy to a 5-6% growth path from the 4-5% now requires many sectoral reforms.
Targeted Sector Reforms
On sectoral reform specifically, Fernando’s argument is that Sri Lanka already knows what needs to happen. The economy has grown close to 5% for two straight years, a genuine turnaround after a currency collapse and debt crisis. But he argues that getting past that number now depends on passing a test the country has mostly failed before: agreeing on what needs fixing is easy. Building it is not.
A key example sits in trade. Sri Lanka committed to building a National Single Window, connecting every agency an exporter deals with, from customs to plant quarantine, when it ratified the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2016. A decade later, it still doesn’t exist. Sri Lanka’s own 2025 customs data shows a standard import container takes over 44 hours to clear, more than 100 times longer than Singapore’s 24 minutes.
Fernando says this is exactly the kind of fix Sri Lanka needs to prioritise now. “The next stage of growth to get from 4-5% growth to over 6% on a sustainable basis really requires a lot more sectoral reform,” he says.
The World Bank estimates Sri Lanka is leaving close to $10 billion a year in export earnings on the table. It’d be enough to support over 142,000 additional jobs. Yet, they’re out of reach as long as fixes like the Single Window remain unmet. Of the reforms the Chamber has lobbied for, most have been agreed to. In its own account of last year’s budget, the Chamber said that despite 11 reforms it proposed being accepted, there was “little visible progress.” That gap, between what’s been agreed and actually built, is what stands between Sri Lanka and its next phase of growth.
Three cases show where Sri Lanka currently stands on that test.
The divestiture of state assets gets a passing grade on this test and is still in progress. The government holds land and infrastructure it could divest through a legislated public-private partnership framework. Mattala International Airport shows the government can act when the incentive is strong enough. Built for $209 million, mostly financed by a Chinese loan, it has lost money since it opened and still costs Sri Lanka close to Rs3 billion a year. It’s now out to a 30-year lease tender, split between airport operations and a separate development zone. Forty-seven parties, including firms from India, China, and the UAE, have applied. Plantation land is moving on a similar track: about 80% of Sri Lanka’s land is state-owned, much of it idle and held by state plantation entities like the Janatha Estates Development Board (JEDB), and two rounds of releases are now underway across seven districts. “If we can convert one of these two and get it implemented, that will give confidence for more,” Fernando says.
Tourism gets a failing grade and for a fixable reason. The Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau exists to promote the country as a tourist destination.To hire an advertising agency, it must clear the same procurement process used to build a road or a hospital, starting from scratch every time. Finishing it in six months is considered a good outcome, according to senior officials in the institution. Sri Lanka has had six national slogans since 2000. None lasted long enough to mean anything. The result shows up in the numbers. Arrivals hit a record 2.36 million in 2025. Earnings fell anyway, down 4.9% year-on-year by February 2026, the sixth straight monthly decline, because average daily tourist spend had to be revised down, from $171 to $148. “We are not getting the level of spend that we really require,” Fernando says.
The National Single Window for exports is the oldest question on the exam, still unanswered. Sri Lanka agreed to build one when it ratified the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2016. A decade later, it doesn’t exist. The Chamber raised it with the President in September 2025; its chairman called it, “critical to improving Sri Lanka’s trade competitiveness.” Fernando says the cost is time: “I think it’s a productivity unlock that can really come in. And then you can devote that time from those resources to other areas. So for example, how do we better prepare for EU regulations that are coming on packaging and things like that.”
Three more items face the same test: labour reform, land reform, and a national digital ID, already accepted into this year’s budget but not yet built. Labour reform has it worse: the government shelved it in November 2024. The scorecard is mixed, one deal in progress, one system still missing, one reform blocked outright. Fernando’s belief is that if Sri Lanka clears enough of them they’ll collectively compound into accelerating growth. “We have the building blocks,” he says, “above the foundation.”
AI Can Drive Growth But Only Once the Foundation is Ready
AI, in Fernando’s telling, is Sri Lanka’s next real driver of growth. But growth from it depends on readiness, not ambition, and not all sectors are equally ready. AI runs on data. Before a business can use it, that data has to be collected, stored, and structured properly. “Digitisation comes first, then you collect data, and then use AI,” Fernando says. “You can’t use AI without a proper foundation.” In agriculture, the gap shows. “Some companies have moved ahead with digitisation. They know what’s going on in their plantation, how to apply the fertiliser or seeds. All of those are monitored. But many [plantations] are not,” Fernando says. The unmonitored majority is the larger problem. “If you look at tea or rubber, 70% of the farmers are smallholders,” he says, “they have to work with some of the larger companies, or with government support and multilateral support,” to bring these tools in at all.
Readiness isn’t only about data. It’s also about the infrastructure to use it. Sri Lanka ranks 127th out of 149 countries for fixed broadband speed, and 72nd out of 100 for mobile, according to Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index. The Chamber’s own Vision 2030 plan names expanding rural broadband as one of the fixes needed to lift the digital economy’s share of GDP from 5% to 10%. Without that connection, the tools AI needs to run on don’t reach the businesses that need them.
IT and outsourcing already show what that readiness produces. A survey by SLASSCOM, the industry’s national association, found 51% of firms already using GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant, with another 56% planning to adopt it within 18 months. At Calcey, a software engineering firm, AI use is now mandatory, and its founder estimates it has lifted efficiency by 25 to 35%, mostly in coding, testing, and documentation.
That readiness is already reshaping hiring, not just output. Cut+Dry, a 120-person software firm, has stopped hiring entirely, citing productivity gains from AI tools as the main reason, cutting off one of the industry’s traditional entry points for new graduates. Fernando’s own hope runs the other way. “The worry a lot of the time is that AI will displace workers,” he says. “But what we understand with a lot of our members is they’re trying to see how the existing employees can get retrained in these process tasks. You automate it, you have agents involved, and then you’re able to utilise your time to do more thinking-related work that will have more long term benefits for the organisation.”
Readiness looks different again for smaller businesses. Fernando points to something simpler than restructuring: showing up. “We rely a lot on ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, these AI engines,” he says. “If there was a foreign person looking for cinnamon, how do you use the optimisation of AI from your end as an SME to show up in those searches?” The same logic extends to manufacturing. “Being able to use these different tools to help in your existing business, for manufacturing companies, if they can use it in the production process, those gains will come in,” he says.
Fernando says the harder question isn’t whether to adopt AI, but which parts of it are actually worth adopting, and how ready a sector is to make that call. “The issue is because of how rapid the changes are with a lot of these models,” he says. “The challenge is to identify and distinguish from the hype to figure out what works for your business.” He draws a clear line between sectors. “Some companies are ready for it. Especially those exposed to the global economy, for survival and maintaining existing clients. But the challenge will be for traditional sectors to take that leap and justify your investment in it.” He circles back to agriculture, the sector furthest from ready. “I think that’s why digitisation hasn’t worked. They don’t see value in giving their data to a third party or someone collecting it, because they don’t see a benefit. It’s not immediately apparent.”
The tools already exist. Readiness, sector by sector, business by business, is still the open question.
Funding Climate Adaptation
At the Chamber’s climate summit this year, Dilhan Fernando, Chairman of Dilmah Tea, told the audience that the quality standard that has defined Ceylon tea for generations is becoming difficult to meet. Longer droughts and heavier rains are wearing down the growing conditions tea depends on, and a decline in quality is often an early sign of a bigger drop in output to come.
Shiran splits climate action into two parts: mitigation (cutting emissions), and adaptation (reducing the damage when shocks hit). Sri Lanka, he says, is “a small island nation” that doesn’t “contribute much to greenhouse emissions,” yet remains “one of the most vulnerable” to climate shocks.
On mitigation, he says Sri Lanka is in reasonable shape. The country has a target of 70% renewable energy by 2030. The financing to support it exists through bank lending and a market for green bonds. Adaptation is a harder problem. Fernando says the timelines are longer and the risks are less certain, which makes it difficult to build a clear business case, and harder still to attract finance for it.
That doesn’t mean the money isn’t out there. Fernando says the real obstacle is what Sri Lanka does with it. “There is a lot of finance available, but I think it’s about creating a set of projects and a project pipeline that is able to then attract this finance,” he says, and building “a story around it” that can turn available money into actual investment. Right now, with El Niño back, he says the country is still firefighting each shock as it comes rather than getting ahead of the next one.
Agriculture is where he sees the clearest opening. Climate-smart farming, he says, is “a big opportunity” for business, and if adaptation is built into it properly, it could help the country avoid or soften the impact of future shocks rather than just recover from them afterwards.
Sri Lanka has one such opening sitting unused. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement lets countries sell verified emissions reductions to others looking to offset their own, and Fernando says there’s real interest from abroad in doing exactly that with Sri Lanka. The framework for it exists. Sri Lanka hasn’t operationalised it. Get that right, he says, and the money could flow into things the country badly needs anyway, replanting in the plantation sector, or storage for the renewable energy it’s trying to scale up. The droughts and heavy rains Dilhan Fernando described at the summit aren’t a one-off, and Sri Lanka has been here before. “If the adaptation finance is more available, things are more done, we’ll be more ready,” Shiran Fernando says.
The Chamber’s evolving role
That same instinct, favouring specific action over broad gestures, shapes how Fernando runs the Chamber itself. Asked about his vision for the institution, he points to one priority: making it more member-oriented. “The chamber is driven by, of course, the members,” he says. Over the next few years, he wants members to utilise the full range of services the institution offers them, complementing the existing experience of the Chamber’s public policy work with initiatives that would be relevant for the members.
Being member-oriented means something different depending on the size of the business. For larger firms, “They would like to diversify their dollar revenues, diversifying their revenue base through export expansion or setting up international operations,” Fernando says. It’s why larger firms increasingly join Chamber delegations overseas, seeking to turn connections into new markets. He says the last 12 months have seen more interest in delegations to Sri Lanka and going out.
SMEs want something more specific: access to buyers they couldn’t reach on their own, improvement of their products, and access to finance. The Chamber brings large and small businesses together at its events and works with regional chambers around the country to widen that reach further. Fernando says the approach is already paying off. “We saw several retail firms find suppliers through these regional chambers,” he says. The Chamber plans a second national SME forum in August to build on that, aimed at linking smaller businesses to value chains, market access, and financing they could not secure alone.
Today, the Chamber’s work runs through three pillars. Policy advocacy is the Chamber’s collective voice to government. Seventeen sector and steering committees, made up of private sector members and independent experts, gather input and pass it to the Chamber board, which then escalates it to the government as a single, unified position. Fernando points to recent results: 18 of the Chamber’s proposals were reflected in this year’s national budget, alongside advocacy successes in areas like food and beverage labelling and US tariff negotiations. Market access connects Sri Lankan businesses with buyers and partners overseas, through 21 bilateral business councils and almost 140 MOU partnerships with chambers and industry bodies abroad. Engagement ties the other two together, running the seminars and forums, with the Economic Summit and this year’s Climate Summit being prominent examples.
For Fernando, all of these points toward one larger ask. He wants policymakers to see the private sector as “a partner in the national development process,” he says. Vision 2030, the Chamber’s own plan, sets a target of 6-7% growth, in line with what the government itself is aiming for. Getting there, in Fernando’s telling, means convincing bureaucrats to “take risks that will benefit not only the private sector, but the public as a whole.”