3.5 Business The economy of St. Lucia is generally based on tourism, agriculture, manufacturing, a small off‐ shore financial sector, and a fledgling information technology services sector. Agriculture has been in severe decline for several years since the withdrawal of preferential treatment for banana exports. The manufacturing sector produces paper products, food processing, beverage production, clothing, and assembly of electronic components. Some terminal shipping facilities exist at Castries and Vieux Fort, and oil transhipment at Cul de Sac. However, the business sector has not fully exploited the enabling capabilities of ICT to link to and engage with its business partners in neither the supply chain nor its customers. 3.6 Government The public sector of St. Lucia has 15 ministries and about 9,073 employees, which includes 3,016 in the core service, and about 54 doctors, 207 nurses, 954 police, and 1623 teachers. There are currently about 800 PCs within the public service that are connected to a government wide area network and a further 400 standalone PCs. These computers are managed and supported by the government’s in‐house ICT agency, Computer Centre Ltd (CCL). CCL also manages the data centre, the network infrastructure, the Help Desk, and several Ministry of Finance software applications. The organisation provides first level support for applications developed in‐house and for some third party solutions. It assists with the preparation of ICT proposals and the determination of systems requirements, as well as provisioning hosting services. CCL is run by a General Manager and has about 15 members of staff who provide services to government. These services are covered by a Service Level Agreement with the Ministry of Finance. CCL does not currently have an off‐site or backup data centre. [16]