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44 winners bag awards at Freda Corea Awards 2023

Freda Corea Awards 2023 - A Progressive Step Towards Women’s Empowerment

The Freda Corea Awards (FCA) ceremony was held on 15th February 2024. This ceremony was organized to recognize the inspirational women who succeeded in defeating poverty and uplifting their family status through family empowerment.  

The FCA project was conceptualized as a competition for story writers in the form of a research-based exercise that aimed to gather vital information on the problems and challenges faced by low and middle-income earning women from all 9 provinces in their journey toward empowerment.

The datasheets provided by GCF were duly filled by the writers after face-to-face interviews with the inspirational women who were the subjects of their stories. The data sheets are being analyzed and a summary of the findings will be published in a future edition of the Newsletter.  Based on the analysis of data collected, The Gamani Corea Foundation will make recommendations to policymakers to address these issues in policy formulation.

අයිරාοගනීගේ කතාව

GCF Announces a New Research Grant Scheme

The Gamani Corea Foundation (GCF) has recently launched its first competitive research grant program for 2024-2025 to support economic and multi-disciplinary research. The initial round of research awards will mainly focus on economic policy issues in the context of the socio-economic challenges facing Sri Lanka.

The grants will be awarded to individual researchers or research teams to research the themes prioritized by the GCF as well as the themes identified by the grant applicants.

For further details log on to: gcfresearch.lk

Freda Corea

The Freda Corea Awards is a project initiated to honour Mrs. Freda Corea, Dr Gamani Corea’s mother. It is the first project initiated by the Gamani Corea Foundation in memory of Mrs. Freda Corea. She was the only daughter of Mr. John Kothalawela (senior) and Alice Elizabeth Attygalle and the sister of one-time Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Sir John Kothalawela, and Mr. Justin Kothalawela, a well-known person in the private sector. She was educated at Bishops College, Colombo. She married Dr. C.V.S. Corea from a well-known family in Chilaw. She was deeply religious and a devout Christian. Her friends and relations recall her as a lady whose benevolence and kindness knew no bounds. The Horton Lodge donated by Dr. Gamani Corea to the Gamani Corea Foundation was where Freda Corea lived. She maintained the house and garden beautifully and it was an open house for people from all walks of life.

One-Day Workshop for Writers

A one-day workshop was held at Horton Lodge on 29th April 2024 for the writers who contributed stories and completed the data sheets for the Freda Corea Awards 2023 competition.

It was held to appreciate the good work done by these writers who had taken great pains to collect relevant information about the women who were the subjects of their stories. It was also an opportunity for them to get involved with future GCF activities at the provincial level.

The workshop held in a casual and relaxed environment commenced with the participants and the GCF staff getting to know each other. A cordial discussion followed on how they could contribute to the development process of the country by participating in future GCF projects.

Writers who were interested in the proposal were interviewed to ascertain their professional background.

After interviewing 28 candidates were selected to a pool of writers/researchers/ coordinators whose services will be enlisted when necessary for future projects of GCF.

The Sri Lanka Innovators’ Forum

Sri Lanka has encountered an unprecedented economic crisis in recent years, characterized by the GDP growth setback, high fiscal deficit, balance of payments difficulties, high inflation, and debt unsustainability. It is in this background that the GCF launched the Sri Lanka Innovators’ Forum (SLIF) in February 2023 to provide the stakeholders with evidence-based policy recommendations to resolve the country’s economic crisis. In response to GCF’s request the industry experts, officials and academics contributed issues papers on 20 identifies sectors. These papers were presented at round-table discussions held over a period of 12 months since March 2023.

The Forum served as a platform for discussions, debates, and consensus-building on critical issues across the identified sectors. As a major outcome of the Forum, at the request of the National Planning Department, the authors of the issues papers have compiled policy gap matrices for different sectors to be used for national policy formulation purposes.

Spotlight

This month’s spotlight is on the rush and reed conservation and diversification project identified by Nimashi Fernando, a winning reporter of the Freda Corea Awards Competition. According to her, a community-based organization (CBO) promotes rush and reed conservation and traditional agricultural practices in rural areas of the low country wet zone in Sri Lanka. The CBO provides training facilities in appropriate technologies to develop sustainable economic entities consisting of paddy fields, reed beds, and home gardens. 

This project enables the development of a variety of district-specific rush and reed products generating additional income sources for the farming community.

Read more..

Editors
Shiranee Dissanayake
Chandana Wijekoon