Pri's blog

While one group of Colombo’s bold and beautiful gathered at the Lakshman Kadirigamar Institute for International  Relations and Strategic Studies to listen to a former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair,  protected by riot squads of Police who looked like they would welcome some excitement after almost an year of inaction, another section of Colombo’s bold and beautiful met at the Balmoral Room of the Kingsbury Hotel to celebrate the life of an important Sri Lankan, Deshamanya Vidyajothi  Ray Wijewardene , and to present The Ray  Award for Innovation 2015.  Just before both those events, yet another group, this time a group of Colombo’s intellectuals were at the Institute of Ethnic Studies (ICES) listening to Kumari Jayawardene, Farzana Haniffa, Ahilan Kadirgamar and Vijay Nagaraj  with Harini Amarasuriya moderating,  reflect on the past ethnic and religious riots, the impact it had on the individual and the collective, and speak abo...

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...

Yesterday the Sunday Times had an article on the Dark is Beautiful campaign of which Nandita Das is a leader.  (Dark is Beautiful also has a facebook page  if you want to follow their campaign).  I used the fairness cream cosmetic industry as a particular South Asian example of technology injustice in a roundtable on the subject  at Practical Action's recent Green Technology Exhibition.    Technology justice is a concept that has become the rallying call of Practical Action  (formerly ITDG and now transformed into Janathakshan in Sri Lanka) Technology Justice is defined by Practical Action as “the right of people to decide, choose and use technologies that assist them in leading the kind of life they value without compromising the ability of others and future generations to do the same.”  An understanding of the concept is  generated largely through its opposite, technology injustice – and the focus seems to be on recognizing the unequal e...