27 February 2023
List of Issues (LOI) deliberations – Sri Lanka
Submitted by Kumudini Samuel on behalf of The Women and Media Collective and the Centre for Poverty Analysis, Sri Lanka.
Thank you, Madam Chair and Working Group. Good Afternoon!
The issues raised here were not included in the State Party’s submission to CEDAW in April 2022. However they are of critical importance in the context of the unprecedented ongoing financial, debt and economic crisis in the country.
Background
In 2022 Sri Lanka’s economy contracted by 10% resulting in unparalleled loss of incomes and livelihoods, scarcity in essential goods and medicines and significant food insecurity.
Extreme poverty has doubled from 13.1 to 25% ($3.65 per capita)3in just one year and an estimated 42% of households are now in poverty. Food inflation has increased to 60% and real incomes have declined by 15%.5 Crippling austerity measures, (electricity tariffs were increased by 66% this month, February, adding to a major increase in August 2022), compound hardships. Inflation and falling incomes of households indicate that an estimated 6.3 million persons (3 in 10 persons) are food insecure and child malnutrition in Sri Lanka ranks 7th in the world.
Adverse effects of the crisis go well beyond its immediate impact and households sliding into poverty can remain there for generations. This situation needs immediate and urgent redress through careful policy interventions.
Impact on Women
This rapid and unforeseen contraction of economic growth has resulted in diminishing quality of life with disproportionately gendered and grave repercussions for women, adding to the hardships resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Regressive increases in VAT, coupled with austerity, inflation, falling incomes and loss of livelihoods have constrained the economic security of thousands of households, directly affecting women who are tasked with ensuring the welfare of their families. The sharp increase in consumer products, shortages of essentials such as fuel, domestic gas, rice and other food items have been further compounded by lack of access to adequate incomes, rising unemployment and poverty experienced by women as income earners and as unpaid care workers.
In August 2022, UNFPA appealed for USD10.7 million to urgently meet the sexual and reproductive health needs, and protection needs, of women and girls including for life saving medicines, equipment, services and supplies including for the clinical management of rape and domestic violence survivors.
We therefore urge the Committee to ask the State party how it proposes to expand its social protection coverage to:
- 1. meet the gendered needs of women; 2. ensure a special targeting of women in the context of the triple burden they must bear to deal with the impact of the financial crisis; 3. catch new categories of women falling into poverty; 4. expand social provisioning as a percentage of public spending and drastically reduce its inflated defence budget.
- Ask the State party how it will meaningfully strengthen its Samurdhi8livelihoods programme to catch the poorest women (for instance not just encouraging women into unproductive income generation programmes, set up for failure, but give them productive assets);
- Ask the State party how it will improve the targeting and delivery of child nutrition programmes, (including the supply of proteins and vegetable instead of just rice and pulses) and what attention it is paying to meet the special nutritional needs of girls;
- Ask the State party how it will reduce and restrict consumption based indirect tax and desist from using regressive taxation as a tool for domestic resource mobilization and instead how it proposes to increase progressive tax on investment, wealth and capital;
- Ask the State party to assess the impacts of austerity measures on women’s access to adequate, and affordable health care, including sexual and reproductive health; and how it proposes to collect sex disaggregated data on access to healthcare facilities, particularly by women; and what immediate measures it will introduce to mitigate and remedy such impact on women and girls.
Thank you!