VICTORIA, Seychelles, The Seychelles government launched a revamped gov.sc national portal on June 22, marking the first major overhaul of the country’s flagship e-government site in more than ten years and tying the rollout to the build-up to Independence Day.
Vice-President Sebastien Pillay presided over the unveiling at the Savoy Seychelles Resort and Spa in Beau Vallon, with ministers, principal secretaries, and senior officials in attendance. The portal, built jointly by the Department of Information and the Department of Information Communication Technology, replaces a site that DOI staff and outside observers had long described as outdated, hard to use, and out of step with how citizens actually look for government information.
The new platform is built around a single gateway. A government directory lists every ministry, department, and agency with direct links to their operational websites, replacing the patchwork of independent portals that grew up over the past decade. Emergency hotlines and a curated news feed are surfaced on the homepage. A Mon Servis section gives users a single sign-on path to e-services, anchored by SeyID, the national digital identity programme that DOI says will become mandatory for new online services and is being phased into older platforms over time.
The timing of the launch, two weeks before the 50th anniversary of independence, was deliberate. Pillay framed the portal as a statement about the kind of state Seychelles wants to be in its next half-century. The site, he said, “is not merely to give the portal a fresh appearance, but to restore it to its rightful place as a living, well-maintained platform that delivers a genuinely high standard of public service.”
The relaunch comes as small states across the region race to convert bureaucratic processes into online services, a push sharpened by post-pandemic expectations and by the cost of running duplicative paper-based systems. The World Bank’s Digital and AI programme warns that 800 million people globally still lack official identification, limiting access to digital public services, and that even where infrastructure exists, fragmented platforms often block the gains governments are hoping for. The Bank’s strategy paper, published in 2024, urges countries to invest in shared digital public infrastructure, including trusted digital IDs, secure payment rails, and interoperable data systems, as the foundation for user-centred government.
The Seychelles design follows that template. DOI will run content and editorial functions while DICT retains the technical back end, a division the two agencies say will let them roll out updates quickly and keep security patches current. PS Gennie Lucas, who heads DOI, said the revamp was designed to do more than refresh the look: “The revamped egov.sc is more than a digital upgrade. It is a declaration that Seychelles is ready to govern transparently, serve efficiently, and communicate openly in the modern age.”
Her counterpart at DICT, PS Benjamin Choppy, said the new architecture was built around user experience. The previous design, he noted, imposed real limits on what the government could publish, and the rebuild addresses those constraints at the platform level. He called on other government entities to keep their e-services aligned with the central site so users do not end up bouncing between incompatible systems.
Seychelles ranked among the world’s smaller e-government markets in the last UN E-Government Development Index, well behind regional peers Mauritius and South Africa, and the relaunch is being read here as a first step toward closing that gap. Officials acknowledge the harder work, including payments integration, full e-service migration, and the eventual move to a single digital wallet anchored to SeyID, will follow.
The ceremony ended with a symbolic handover from Choppy to Lucas and a patriotic performance by the Seychelles National Youth Council youth band. A poem by Stephanie Joubert framed the moment as a quiet pivot point, less about a website and more about the relationship citizens want with the state in the years ahead.
Sources cited: Department of Information, Seychelles. Department of Information Communication Technology, Seychelles. World Bank Group: Digital and AI. UN E-Government Development Index.
Source: SN
