Pri's blog

  Photo:  at St James Palace early 1996 Often when I am invited  to speak or give interviews in international spaces I am painfully conscious of my undeniable privilege and coloniality. People like me from the global south are invited to the slick platforms that are dominated by the voices from the global north because of our fluency in the language, and because despite our brown/black skins we literally and metaphorically speak the same lingo  The phenomenon is not recent.  Way back in the early 1980s as the Project Coordinator at the Lanka Mahila Samiti (a Sri Lankan association of rural women's societies) of a USAID funded programme that supported small enterprise development for rural women, I represented the USAID mission in Colombo at many conferences in the region – a young woman, skin burnished browner by days spent with women in rural Sri Lanka, but with near flawless English and the panache to navigate the seminar worlds of the Bangkok Hilton or t...

                                            Photo:  KL Sentral (before the pandemic)   The  recently concluded ESCAP Regional Meeting for Asia and the Pacific “City and Transport: Safety, efficiency and sustainability” had a session on Gender Responsive Urban Transport Policies.  I was invited to participate in that session.  I had five minutes for my intervention and this is what I said. I wanted to make a case for approaching transport provision from a rights perspective, and from the perspective of a state’s obligations towards the protection and fulfilment rights of all its citizens.   Cities and economies  are not just  spaces and processes that exist independently of the people that inhabit them and make them work, and it was  encouraging to see that several speakers at the UNESCAP meeting had  begun to...

  The International Women’s Rights Action Watch, Asia Pacific, (IWRAW AP) is part of the global campaign to encourage states to ratify the  ILO Convention C190 on Violence and Harassment in the world of work and as such I have recently been exposed to many discussions around the convention.  One of the more recent online discussions organised by IWRAW AP, ITUC, Action Aid and CARE gave rise to this very impressive graphic recording of the issues being raised This was a conversation that was rooted in South and South East Asia, and the thoughts that were circling in my head as we discussed the challenges of promoting ratification, described in this graphic as patriarchy, lack of political will, political instability, difficulties of implementation, lack of awareness, and a focus on dealing with the pandemic, were about  how complicit we could be with our pretty graphics and online discussions if we didn’t really expose the elephant in the room.   Can we real...

Peg (Margaret) Snyder has passed away.   I learned this today through a message from  Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director, UN Women  Peg was born in 1929 and this would have been her 92nd year. P humzile pays a tribute to her role as “ a pathfinder in the work for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Referred to as the ‘UN’s First Feminist’, ..[she was the] first director of the Voluntary Fund for the UN Decade for Women,  [and]she subsequently became the founding director in 1978 of UNIFEM, or the UN Development Fund for Women, which she led for over a decade”  and you can read more about her illustrious career here on Wikipedia .  There is much in that Wikipedia article that as activists following in her footsteps we need to know, admire, celebrate and take forward . The view from the "West Wing" window I met Peg Snyder just three or four years ago, when at the request of a neighbour, Nancy Baldwin,  at 10 Mitchell Place w...

  photo by Sharni Jayewardene ---------- Today Somadevi Pattini Kannangara (nee Ranasinha) would have been 97 years old, had she not left this world, much too early, almost four decades ago.   It is difficult to picture what my mother might have looked like or been like  in her 90s… She was beautiful, both inside and out, she was clever, she was fun, she had impeccable taste and she had this great capacity to love.    Her father, my grandfather, despite his very colonial orientation (he was Sir Arthur after all) gave his children very local names.  His eldest son, DKVB Ranasinha had the names Darshana Kumaru Vijaya Bahu, his younger daughter was Sita Rupawathie, and my mother, his second child born when he was GA Jaffna was Somadevi Pattini.  Goddess Pattini  or Kannaki Amma as she is known to Sri Lankan Hindu community, is venerated by both Buddhists and Hindus – but her feminine energy that made her at once a good wife and a vengeful one,...

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...