Freda Corea Awards 2024 Gets Underway
The second phase of the Freda Corea Awards (FCA) competition has now commenced. The Freda Corea Awards project was initiated by the Gamani Corea Foundation in 2023 in memory of Mrs. Freda Corea the mother of Dr. Gamani Corea. The theme of the awards was “Inspirational Women”. Its core objective was Women’s Empowerment. It aimed to recognize and reward inspirational women who have effectively defeated poverty by overcoming problems, obstacles, and challenges and uplifted their family status by empowering themselves through determination and creativity.
Freda Corea Awards 2023 was completed with the awards ceremony on 15th February 2024. Forty-four award winners comprised women and their story writers with a success story to share. Due to the unswerving efforts and enthusiastic participation of these women and their storywriters, the Chairman and Board of Directors of the Gamani Corea Foundation decided to extend the FCA competition to 2024. It is hoped that the untiring efforts of these women will be an inspiration for other like-minded women to follow in their footsteps.
The Freda Corea Awards 2023 conducted as a research-based competition, threw up several new avenues and opportunities for empowering rural women and preparing them to make a more meaningful and productive contribution to the country’s future economic development.
Phase II – FCA 2024
Based on the observations of FCA phase I, it was decided to adopt a broader holistic approach to empowering rural women. In addition to rewarding inspirational women and their story writers, FCA 2024 would take on the added dimension of rewarding writers for providing a comprehensive narrative with recommendations to solve their problems based on the discussions with inspirational women and knowledgeable people in the provinces, who have first hand knowledge in the subject.
Writers will be rewarded for highlighting the problems experienced at the provincial level, and communicating the solutions suggested both by those who experience them and by other stakeholders, on how they could take their projects to the next higher level.
The Concept – A Competition for Writers
Theme – Inspirational Women.
The project will be a competition for writers and will be held at the provincial level.
Advertisements will be published in Sinhala, Tamil, and English Newspapers shortly, inviting applicants to register as writers for the competition. Their applications should be accompanied by a summary of the story they will be submitting, not exceeding 1 A4 page, spelling out the project, the problems, obstacles, and challenges faced, and how they were overcome. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to submit their final stories along with suggestions/solutions/strategies from the owner/s of the project and other stakeholders on how the project could be taken to the next higher level.
The stories and proposals submitted will be judged on a marks-based evaluation scheme by an evaluation committee appointed by the GCF specially for the purpose. Prizes will be awarded to both the owners of the story and their storywriters for the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ranked stories in each province. The findings from the stories will be sent to policymakers to help them understand the problems at the provincial level when formulating policies for economic recovery and development.
Spotlight
This month the spotlight falls on the tea industry which has suffered a setback within the past few years . However, it is heartening to note that a Kalpani Devanarayana, from the central province has taken the initiative to start a tea plant nursery to provide young tea plants to those involved in small scale tea plantations. According to her, the demand for her product is high. However, she is confronted with the problem of not being able to supply her product to meet the demand.
FCA 2023
This month’s feature is Nirosha Dhamayanthi, an Ayurvedic Doctor from the North Western Province