Pri's blog

I have worked in rural transport for a decade and have been out of the sector for even longer. but as a colleague once observed, you can take the woman out of transport, but you can’t take transport out of the woman, which is why, probably, I have been thinking about the implications the current COVID 19 crisis on transport provision, especially for marginalised women (and men) and children in rural areas. Where I live right now, in Malaysia, containment measures for the COVID 19 virus goes under the apt name of ‘movement control’ which though it still is about control sounds less carceral than the term ‘lockdown’. At different stages of this MCO (as Malaysians call it) we have been allowed limited access to different spaces. Right now, the RMCO (recovery movement control order) is relatively relaxed and for the most part it would seem that in Malaysia at least we can move about freely, while wearing masks in public spaces and adhering to social distancing protocols.   Of cours...

Wrote this for a webinar organised by  Duryog Nivaran  and the Institute for Disaster Management and Vulnerability Studies at the Dhaka University on    Women and Work in Pandemics: resilience and recovery.   It was good to be back on a Duryog Nivaran   platform after several years , and as a founder member of the network, I was proud that it continued to be p ersistent in making sure that the need for gender equality is not forgotten in the discourse and practice of disaster risk management, resilience and recovery.  Talking about  the rights of women in the informal sector provided provided the opportunity to highlight the situation of women workers who  have are more often than not forgotten, and more often than not are invisible.  photo by me: women cleaners at Galle Face, Colombo   Who are these women? The informal sector includes a  wide range of jobs and economic activities - street vendors, home-based workers i...