Chulie De Silva's blog

Iresha Dilhani from the remote village of Mahavillachchiya in North  Central Sri Lanka is one of the beneficiaries of taking Internet into rural areas in Sri Lanka.  She works in her parents mud and wattle house on the  laptop she bought from money she earned working on line for business company.

Communicate your right to shape the world.

Say what you want to say, look at what others are saying; learn, network, communicate and shape the world you are going to live in. This is the message going out to youth as the World Bank Colombo office launches its Say it! Look@ program on the 1st May on channel ETV at 8:00 to 8:30 P.M.

The program is a convergence of new social media and the established old media of television and newspapers. The rationale is to provide an interactive space on the Web, as well as through an introductory monthly TV documentary a virtual Youth Commons where Youth can express their opinions, join in discussions, interact and build networks.

The Specific Objectives are to:

28 year old mum Sewdini with Kuveneshi. The future is theirs. Photograph © Chulie de Silva

They come carrying babies in arms, toddlers in bicycle baskets, the disabled in wheel chairs, the old and the young, to gather under a tree to plan and build back their village and the community. The meeting at Jeyapuram South in the North of Sri Lanka is held under the Cash for Work Program (CfW) a component of the World Bank’s Emergency Northern Recovery Project (ENREP). The meeting of resettled villagers commences with songs of inspiration, with everyone joining in. The voices are strong, they sing in unison, and hands are raised, the spirits revived.

The CfW program is the only source of employment for a large number of the people in most of the resettled villages immediately after their return to their home villages. The program provides incomes to the returning Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) a minimum of 50 days of employment to rehabilitate their own houses and gardens, clean and repair wells, irrigation canals, roads, drains, schools, mosque and church buildings. The aim of the CfW is to bridge the income gap between the time of return of the returnees (after receiving emergency resettlement provisions) and until the IDPs are able to obtain an income from regular livelihoods.

Conflict affected young girl in a resettled village supported by the NEIAP project, Vavuniya, Sri Lanka

So Australia is huffed that they have fallen behind South Africa and Sri Lanka, not in cricket ICC rankings but in the annual Global Gender Gap Index released a month or so ago. How ignominious to fall behind their cricketing rival, Sri Lanka, who in terms of development is a minion—far behind Australia.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions wailed “Australian employers must do more to encourage women’s participation in the workforce and close the gender pay gap.“

The Global Gender Gap report hardly made any waves here. This year, Sri Lanka has slipped 4 places to 16th place. However, the report says Lanka’s overall performance in 2008 has improved relative to 2007. “Sri Lanka continues to hold a privileged position of having the best performance in the region regarding political empowerment,” said the report. Sri Lanka was ahead of Spain (17), France (18), Australia (20) and U.S.A. (31).

So are we Sri Lankan women more prosperous and hold more equal position at the workplace than the Sheila’s in Oz?

Photo Credit: (c) Chulie De Silva

Reading the story today of Sri Lanka’s emergence as a success story in safer childbirth with a remarkable decline in maternal deaths, I mused about how I took for granted that childbirth would be safe when I had my children way back in the early 70’s. It was joy unlimited as I breezed through pregnancies always under the stern but very caring eye of my GP, Dr. Navaratnam. The news today that Sri Lanka should be held as an example for other South Asian countries makes me very grateful for the high quality of medical care that was available to us.

Presenting a paper at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, UK, South Asia Day, Dr Hemantha Senanayake, from the University of Colombo, said the “mortality ratio of Sri Lanka has declined dramatically as a direct result of the availability of midwives and trained assistance. “In 1960, the child mortality was 340 per 100,000; however, it was lowered to 43 per 100,000 live births in 2005.”