International Trade, Finance, and Development alum Yajna Sanguhan ’14 is a research assistant at the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), a think tank in Sri Lanka. An article she wrote on women-headed households (WHHs) has just been published in that country’s DailyFT newspaper.
Excerpt from the article:
“While we continue to use the concept of “head of the household”, it is imperative that as a first step to deconstructing WHHs and informing policy makers, new methods are employed to collect data and a rigorous, holistic approach is taken to capture the diverse and nuanced experiences amongst Women-Headed Households in Sri Lanka…
Understanding the gendered dimensions of poverty not only requires superior data but a better use of the currently available data.”
The article is part of an ongoing series of articles by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) about WHHs that tries to present a more nuanced understanding of the topic. There are many WHHs across Sri Lanka, but there has been a rise due to the 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009.
Yajna has been working at CEPA for a year and developed this article as a result of her research into gender and poverty in the context of post-war Sri Lanka.