ALLANKULAM, 8. September 2011 (IRIN) – Mere fokus på politik og programmer målrettet til støtte for husholdninger ledet af enlige kvinder i Sri Lankas tidligere uroplagede område ønskes.
“Most programmes don’t take into account the unique role of women here,” Saroja Sivachandran, director of the Center for Women and Development (CWD), an advocacy body based in northern Jaffna, told IRIN.
“They may be providing for the families, but [women] still have to cook, look after children and do all household chores.”
Since returning to their villages in the conflict-affected north at the end of the country’s 26-year-long civil war in 2009, women have found their traditional role of household chores and child-rearing expanded with the burden of making a living, rebuilding damaged houses and a host of other tasks. “Unfortunately, very few [organizations] seem to have recognized this,” Sivachandran said.
Though no official figures are available, the CWD estimates the war left 40,000 widowed, female-headed households in the north, not including women whose husbands went missing during the conflict or who are in government detention for ties to the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who had been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland.
In August, the World Bank re-launched a cash-for-work programme in the Northern Province, originally modified in 2010 to accommodate women’s familial obligations. Sixty-five percent of participants were women and the programme allowed them to choose how long they worked, and provided day-care by paying elders to look after the children, said Susrutha Goonasekera, a social protection economist for the World Bank.
But, more than two years since the end of the conflict, adapting to the changing role of women in the northern Vanni is still lagging, locals say.
