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...

There was an animated discussion via my facebook on the underrepresentation of women in the new parliament, following the General Election of August 17.  The debate was stimulated by the fact that probably the one woman from the winning UNFGG who has come to Parliament off her own bat (not because of male spouses, siblings or parents), Rosy Senanayake , lost her seat in the preferential voting.  The number of women in this Parliament has decreased to eleven, from thirteen in the previous one.    The national lists of all contending parties are also devoid of significant numbers of women, and what caused the FB furore was the fact that some of us were advocating that  the Prime Minister (and other leaders, though that was not quite so explicit) uses the national list to increase women’s representation, and perhaps bring people like Rosy back into Parliament. There are some people who think Rosy is arrogant – but by and large most people think she did a...

Shared responsibility - inland waters, Trincomalee Here’s a brief, somewhat  academic blog – inspired by listening to Frances Stewart at a webinar organised by ODI, in the context of doing a Gender Synthesis  of the first round of panel data for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium.   Most of my readers  may want to escape from this rather unexpected theoretical musing on my part! My problem is that I am not sure that gender falls into how Frances Stewart conceptualises  Horizontal Inequality , even though in some of her writing she thinks it does (1);  and even though, from an external analytical perspective there are visible structural inequalities between women and men.  So as  Stewart et al point out, gender as a group affiliation matters, because it is tightly bounded and members can’t move from one gender to another and because being a member of the group, results in levels of discrimination (ibid).  What I am not...

Just returned from the above UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction - where I represented Duryog Nivaran , and had two speaking slots: as a panellist at the launch of the Global Assessment Report 2015  and at the Ministerial Roundtable on Governing Disaster Risk: overcoming challenges.  Also worked closely with the Women's Major Group, coordinated by WEDO.  Interesting as UN conferences go, but significant, since its the first of three that are aiming to frame the post-2015 world development agenda - what the world is going to do about disasters, sustainable development and climate. Many interesting thoughts to share... but for now, here is my intervention at the Ministerial Round Table chaired by Ms Maria del Pilar Cornejo, Minister Secretary for Risk Management, Ecuador.  at the roundtable with the African Union President on my left and the City of Istanbul on my right. Photo by Ramona Miranda G ood afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen, I represent...

Given that it is International Women’s Day, it is probably a good time to reflect on how the transport sector does (or does not) engage with women’s transport needs.  Of course this is not a new subject,  but despite efforts by several women and men, notably in the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development (IFRTD), the World Bank’s SSATP, and other networks interested in bringing some equity into the transport sector, the problem still remains.   Women’s issues, and particularly the issues of  poor urban and rural women,  remain marginal to transport sector planning.  It is not to say that the sector has not progressed.  When, as  the IFRTD’s first Executive Secretary, I presented the Balancing the Load proposal to what was then DFID’s Knowledge and Research (KAR) funding arm in 1996,  I am told the (male) engineers reviewing the proposals laughed at our audacity and dismissed the proposal with hardly a glance. Balanc...

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...

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...

(text of a talk given at the Soroptimist International 40th Anniversary celebration s) The idea of ‘post-war’  immediately conjures up  the situation in the North and the East where the overt  fighting was most severe, and where the war devastated the infrastructure, displaced communities and destroyed a way of life and living. But at the same time, I don’t think we should be  confining our label of ‘post-war’ to the north and east.  It’s my contention that ALL  of Sri Lanka is in a post-war situation;  the war has affected all of us – in the north and in the south – Tamils and Sinhalese, and all of our institutions and our governance systems, and even our own individual ways of thinking and behaving.  It has polarized communities.  The growing militarization and centralization of government, the encroachment of the military into commerce and other spheres, the disregard for lives and livelihoods of people with no voice – we can see...

Some of the outcomes of a panel discussion on the subject that I facilitated at the Asian Transport Forum at the Asian Development Bank in Manila on the 11th September, interspersed with some thoughts of my own... What is inclusive transport? The World Bank discusses the issues relating to inclusive transport as " the availability of transport services for the poor, women, persons with disability and the elderly has emerged as an important issue in the context of a number of transport policies. It requires the removal of institutional and physical barriers and the enhancement of incentives to increase the accessibility of diverse individuals and groups to transport opportunities" (see : http://go.worldbank.org/61NANCE7X0) The ADB looks at the need to pay special attention to mobility and accessibility especially of low-income households as differentiated by their gender, age and ability. They aim to ensure equitable and affordable transport and ensure access to the ...

Gender Dimensions of the Millennium Developmebt Goals in Sri Lanka I was one of three speakers at the launch of the UNDP’s “Gender Dimensions of the Millennium Development Goals in Sri Lanka” volume. The publication was researched and written by a team from CENWOR (Centre for Women’s Research http://www.cenwor.lk/ ). The other two speakers were Dr Anila Dias Bandaranaike, former Director of Statistics and Assistant Governor at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and Dr Pat Alailima, a former Director General of Planning. Distinguished company. My remit was to talk about Goals 3 and 7 in all of 10 minutes – so here, not quite verbatim, is what I said. I began by congratulating the writers, researchers and compilers of the report. [Though I didn’t say it, I did think while I was reading it “trust the women to be realistic rather than euphoric about Sri Lanka’s much lauded social indicators and gender equality achievements”!] I also congratulated the UNDP for putting out an eye-catching and at...