Karunawathie Menike

Working in the impoverished regions of Sri Lanka’s arid interior, Karunawathie Menike supports women-led business ventures as an entry point to a larger process of social transformation.

Karunawathie proves that the poorest citizens of Sri Lanka are capable of competing in national economic markets and thriving without government handouts. She first helps villagers secure economic independence by establishing savings groups and supporting business ventures through small loans. Once they are able to provide for themselves, she helps them develop an awareness of their rights. Using this awareness she pushes villagers toward active and responsible citizenship, and equips them to hold their government accountable to standards of integrity and transparency. Finally, she promotes new kinds of philanthropy among the local rich to sustain long-term development projects for the stressed arid zones.

Poverty and lack of economic opportunity pervade the dry and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka. Roughly 26 percent of the country’s population lives below the poverty line, but this proportion rises sharply in the arid zones. The government has resettled many of the country’s landless poor, by offering them land and other benefits to settle into areas where the weather is harsh, land is infertile, and rainfall scarce. The region had no electricity until very recently. Almost no insurance companies or banks operate in the region, and those that do are reluctant to serve the poor. To deal with emergencies and life-transforming events like births, marriages, and deaths, residents often have to borrow from moneylenders at exorbitant interest rates that keep them forever in debt.

Challenges like these are compounded by the inefficiency and corruption of the government institutions that are supposed to deliver help. Aid projects rarely deliver on their promises, and sometimes fail even to reach needy communities. Funds for development projects go only to villages that bring votes to influential politicians. Corruption from police to politicians leaves most villagers cynical, without hope that their situation can change.

Women have played a subordinate role in this dysfunctional system. On the rare occasions that they are able to find work, women receive significantly less pay than males working the same jobs. When they make crafts of their own, middlemen take the lion’s share of the profit. With little opportunity for gainful employment, women are either forced into the informal sector or choose to care for their families full-time. Either way, with little income they remain almost entirely dependent on government programs to put food on the table.

Karunawathie works to transform this system by pursuing five interlocking goals.

Karunawathie forms poor women into savings groups and encourages them to save at least a rupee a month. In its first year, the group accumulates capital, and from the second year on, they support business ventures for their members through microloans. Less than three years after she founded her group, Karunawathie found that the group’s 85 members were saving more than 100 rupees per month. She also put in place a smaller savings system called the Box Book into which women can deposit their savings, to be withdrawn only in time of emergency. These two mechanisms help to redeem poor families from the clutches of moneylenders, who would otherwise be their only source of capital in hard times.

To increase women’s income to the level of independence, Karunawathie connects them to a variety of careers. When she first began her work, the only economic activities available to poor women were manufacturing handicrafts and rearing cows, and most handicrafts had not yet reached the level of quality that would allow them to be marketed to a wide audience. To address this problem, she sought the assistance of the National Design Center, whose experts partnered with local women to create crafts of high value. She displayed these crafts at a national exhibition and secured additional markets for the newly refined products.

Establishing handicraft manufacturing to become a significant source of income for women required ending the exploitative influence of middlemen. Karunawathie helped the women in her program sell their products collectively, providing crafts directly to distributors rather than working through intermediaries. Through collective bargaining, the women get better prices and develop vital connections to urban markets. They also began to understand the dynamics of business, finding and making the most of the sources of demand for their products. Karunawathie challenged women to develop new products, organizing competitions and giving rewards for best products. For those who are not involved in craft production, she helps them find nontraditional work like masonry, carpentry and brickmaking whose high wages can help women support their families without government aid.

Karunawathie created the Wilpotha Women’s Organization (WWO) to coordinate her many programs and to serve as a savings facility. The WWO enables its dues-paying members to take out large loans to expand their business ventures. They can be confident in the terms of these loans because their organization’s policies and procedures are completely open and transparent. With trust in the fairness and benefits of their bank, women feel comfortable saving their money, building a buffer to sustain them when they give birth or encounter an emergency. Karunawathie also started a savings groups for elderly people so that they can fund pilgrimages to India and care for their own health.

Karunawathie directly tackles the corruption that has plagued her district since she was a child. In the early years of her political action, she helped lead a protest with a surprising result: when she and a group of women demanded fair distribution of government aid, the government handed over the distribution to them. Women took over the monitoring of government services and created a watchdog system that has become a model for other communities seeking government accountability. As women gain experience through the WWO and its attendant watchdog group, they begin to tear down stereotypes about what women can do. Several WWO alumni have become representatives in local governing bodies.

Finally, Karunawathie has persuaded a group of wealthy local citizens to provide capital for the small loans of the WWO. This is great achievement, because the local rich have traditionally donated only for religious purposes. Now that wealthy citizens have seen the transformation that Karunawathie brings in rural areas, their mindset has changed. The resulting increase in local philanthropy will allow rural women to greatly decrease their dependency on foreign funds.

Women gain confidence and independence in Karunawathie’s programs; where once they would wait for external aid to solve their problems, now they calmly engineer their own solutions. For example, when they needed a building for their office and a hall for a production floor, the women bought the land with their combined savings and completed the building themselves. Once a year the WWO holds a huge fair and exhibition, complete with street plays on social issues. Women come to the fair in large numbers from even the farthest districts of Sri Lanka. After the annual fair, the Wilpotha women get many requests to spread their work and to train other women’s groups. Karunawathie follows up on all these requests.

Karunawathie Menike remembers going to bed hungry as a child on the days her father did not find work. Her father was a poor farmer, and she was one of seven children. In school she was very good in math and was the class “accountant,” but her family did not have the money to continue her education. Frustration from this unjust situation made her determined to fight poverty when and wherever she could. Although she never left her village until she was 18 years old, and though she did not hear of donor agencies until four years later, she spent almost all of her time developing organic solutions to the problems faced by her region. She started her first savings group in the late 1970s, and has worked tirelessly for women-led economic development ever since.

Karunawathie is also committed to ethnic harmony. When a ceasefire to ethnic violence was declared two years ago and the roads to the north were opened, she led the first delegation to visit women in war-torn areas. In exchange, those women have visited Wilpotha to study her model. She plans to extend her work to the north and east where war has left many communities without jobs or basic social infrastructure.