Pri's blog

Written by a  female member of the CGC [1] An article in the Colombo Telegraph provides an interesting account of a seasoned campaigner’s interactions about the forthcoming Presidential elections with Colombo’s businessmen and  what he also calls the ‘Cinnamon Garden Crowd’ especially the women.  He finds that these Colombo society women have not taken the trouble to register themselves as voters and that the businessmen are unabashedly supporting  Mahinda Rajapakse’s re-election.   Over Christmas I too have had an overdose of interactions with a section of the ‘Cinnamon Garden Crowd’ – women and men, doctors, lawyers and professionals  mainly – interactions that were more than slightly annoying on three counts.  The first is their unconditional support to the Common Candidate Project based mainly on their blind faith in the goodness of Ranil Wickremesinghe (undoubtedly a member of their crowd) and his ability to deliver good governan...

Busy with family and Christmas, but trying also to keep up with the run up to the January 8th Presidential Election, not least because it is likely to be the most decisive of our times.   Watch this speech from Jeevanie Kariyawasam - gave me some hope, not just hope for a change of regime, but hope that there is some fire in the next generation! Post by Jeevanee Kariyawasam .

I spent three days last week  in Nairobi, Kenya at the Advisory Group Meeting of ENERGIA, the international network on gender and sustainable energy.  ENERGIA, led by its beautiful and energetic head, Sheila Operaocha, has transformed itself from a network of organisations (mainly NGOs working with women and renewable energy technologies) interested in mainstreaming gender into energy projects and programmes and empowering  poor women, to a 15 million euro programme intent on providing energy services to poor women, through fostering women’s entrepreneurship in the energy services sector.   The goal of  empowering women  and going to the last mile to address energy poverty is still part of the network’s vision, but this fifth phase programme is a  huge step up  (up?) from what it was doing before, and the organisations delivering the programme ( Solar Sisters , Kopernic etc)  are much better described as social entrepreneurs r...

This may be a strange thing to say after the recent devastating landslide in the Meeriyabedde Tea Plantation  in Koslanda that occupied our thoughts in the last couple of weeks, but there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster.  What we have are natural hazards.    The disaster that follows a natural hazard, whether it is a tsunami,  earthquake, flood, drought, cyclone or landslide depends on  how much impact the hazard has on  people, assets and the environment.   The numbers of people and assets that are damaged by the  occurrence of the natural hazard turns the event into a disaster.  The  damage  of course is largely dependent on the choices we make about how we use our land, how we build our buildings, what kind of government we have, and how our financial system works. Disaster risk is seen as the frequency and severity of the hazard, the numbers of people and assets exposed to the hazard and ...

Gamani Corea Ray Wijewardene These two weeks [1] we will honour the lives of two Sri Lankans who dared re-imagine a different world: a world that was more equal and more sustainable.   Dr Gamani Corea, best known for being the Secretary General of UNCTAD from 1964-1984, dared to re-imagine a new international world order, which recognised inequality between nations, and advocated for discriminatory or preferential treatment in the world of trade for those lagging behind.  Ray Wijewardene, engineer, aviator, inventor and athlete, re-imagined a world where natural resources were used sustainably, and spent much of his life working on sustainable agriculture and renewable energy.    These two men were born within a year of each other, Wijewardene in 1924 and Corea in 1925 and both lived well into their 80s.   Wijewardene passed away in 2010, two days before his 86 th birthday, and Corea in 2013, a day before he would have turned 88.   B...

 see my blog on this on CEPA's blogspace

The Human Development Report 2014 is entitled Sustaining human progress: Reducing vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, and if nothing else has foregrounded two of the key concepts in the current development discourse i.e. vulnerability and resilience. The concept of vulnerability In discussing vulnerability, the HDR aims to move beyond the traditional concept of vulnerability that comes from the disaster risk reduction discourse and  which is about exposure to risk and risk management including insuring against shocks and diversifying assets and incomes,    to what it calls ‘human vulnerability’ which is the prospects of eroding peoples’ capabilities and choices.  This definition can be linked to the idea of peoples’ agency, and also to Sen’s idea of entitlement  and serve to broaden the policy debate .   But unfortunately, at the outset itself the HDR then reduces human vulnerability to a categorisation of ‘who’ is vulnerable, ‘what’ th...

The article in today’s Sunday Times on a recent workshop organized by the Law and Society Trust highlights once again the troubling issue of urban evictions. The most telling sentence in this article  reads  This trend of development tactics that marginalise the urban poor, as noted in the discussion is not challenged, due to the lack of interest by many politicians, the lack of awareness of rights by low-income dwellers but more importantly the apathy of the middle class of Colombo as these changes have minimal adverse effects on their livelihoods  At a subsequent forum on the same issues last week, participants called for stronger involvement of political parties, highlighted the collusion of the World Bank’s Metro Colombo Urban Development Project in the evictions and discussed some good practice examples implemented by the Government of Sri Lanka.  All these ideas are important to take forward, but this blog will focus on the last of these, as it is ...

I have been having a conversation with Jamie Enoch, Research and Policy Analyst at the UKCDS, on a study that the UKCDS did for DFID on Mapping Infrastructure Research for Development .  You can read the exchange of words  on the Linked In AFCAP (African Community Access Programme) group if you are a registered member of Linked In, and are inclined to join the group. .  Much of it is show casing the work of the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD) , which, though supported by DFID for several years, received no mention in the report’s chapter on transport.   Despite this omission, it is good to know that another analyst, e.g. Steven Jones, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama, working with AFCAP on identifying " rural transport issues in Sub-Saharn Africa (SSA) to be targeted for future research... aimed at developing a more comprehensive understanding of the overall health impacts (crashes, polllution. healthca...

The Association of Women Affected by War (AWAW) launched the AWAW- FOKUS advocacy road map “What the Women Say – ACTIONS- not Words Count”  - at Earls Court, Cinnamon Lakeside Colombo, this evening. None of the sophistication of most Colombo book launches, but extremely well put together, and an occasion to catch up with some key people working with women – Shyamala Gomez, Nimalka Fernando, Kamini Vitharana,  Mrs Sumana Sumanasekera formerly Women’s Bureau and newly appointed as Chairperson of the National Committee for Women (NCW, or as my aunt, Manel Abeysekera,  would have said during her tenure as chair, NATCOW), as well as Rajiva Wijesinha, Jehan Perera,  and (not in my league)the British High Commissioner, the Norwegian Ambassador and other MPs. We learned from the Chief Guest , the Hon Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaranatunga (confirmed later by others) that  1325 advocate and co-founder of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN ) S...

Yesterday, Ragi Kadirgamar ‘did a session’ at our work place, which unfortunately I was too late to attend.  What he  offers is Satsang, or spiritual talks based on Advaita teachings.  See below an excerpt from his flyer Talks & Meetings. “What are you seeking?”  If you don’t clearly know what you are seeking, HOW can you find it , or know it ? And what specifically are the causes of suffering that ‘ apparently ’ prevent people from getting what they want in life ? “How can you live your daily life, in peace and harmony?” Like his Guru, Ragi guides spiritual seekers away from simply accepting the profound conceptual truth, ‘ Consciousness is I  -  I am Consciousness’,                                        ...