Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange earnings rests on the back of women workers, who predominantly populate the garment sector, tea exports and migrant workers to the Middle East.  Yet, in the current response to Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, the voices and needs of working-class women are once again ignored by policymakers.  However, the evidence is of women intensifying unpaid labour, facing impoverishment and poverty together with their families facing severe malnourishment.  Alongside, the conditions under which they perform paid labour deteriorate and they witness rapid declining real wages.

Feminists and feminist economists argue that debt justice is a feminist value and principle. And at the core of our understanding of debt justice is the principle that working class women cannot be made to pay for the ‘odious debt’ generated by the recklessness international lenders and the corruption of (almost entirely male) Sri Lankan elites (business class, politicians and bureaucrats).  

The IPE hopes to underline the gendered nature of the debt crisis and spotlight on policy changes that may be detrimental to women and working women especially.  We will do this by bringing to our platform crucial feminist work undertaken by numerous activists, analysts on the ground and our own work.