Sri Lanka’s overall computer literacy reported for 2019 was 30.1%, while the urban sector showed the highest computer literacy rate of 41.5% among residential sectors.

Computer literacy rate for Rural and Estate sectors are 28.6 percent and 13.7 percent respectively, according to an annual bulletin on Computer Literacy Statistics - 2019, published by Department of Census and Statistics Sri Lanka.

The percentage of computer literate population over the survey periods has been gradually increasing and accordingly, the survey results show an increase of 1.8 percentage points from 2017 to 2019.

In 2019, at least one computer is available in 22.2 percent of households in the country. That is about one out of every five households owns either a desktop or a laptop computer. This percentage is 38.3 in Urban sector and Rural and Estate sector show 19.9 percent and 3.8 percent respectively.

When the provinces are considered the highest availability is in the Western province (34.7%) while the lowest availability is reported from the Uva (12.9%)

Computer literacy by district level shows the existing differences among districts and further shows the prevailing digital divide.

Computer literacy among the employed population who are aware of computer in Sri Lanka is around 63.7 % in 2019. The positions such as Senior officials and Managers (73.5%), Professionals (87.1%), Technical and Associate professionals (85.2%), Clerks and Clerical support workers (90.7%) have higher computer literacy rates.

Also, even among the individuals engage in elementary occupations 28.1 percent are computer literate.

Among the unemployed, aged (20-24) group shows highest computer literate population percentage (75.2%) in 2019. Results reveal that among unemployed many have at least some ICT skills. Even among the group aged 40-69 every one out of four is computer literate (24.3%) in 2019.

When the digital literacy is considered 44.3% (aged 5 -69) has digital literacy.

Digital literacy is higher than computer literacy for all disaggregated levels, showing the drift from Personal Computer to Smartphones/Tablets.

A bulletin giving details of findings of this survey has been published in the DCS website: www.statistics.gov.lk.