What works in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has implemented a 25% women's quota in local government elections that dramatically increased women's local council representation from under 2% to roughly 23% after the 2018 elections—nearly 2,000 women elected—though compliance weakened to around 11% by 2025 due to legal exemptions. The country's Nenasala telecentre network expanded rural ICT access from under 10% computer literacy (2004) to nearly 40% (2014) at its peak of ~1,000 centres, but contracted to just 46 centres by 2024, demonstrating sustainability challenges. Researchers at SLIIT developed Pubudu, a deep-learning app for screening learning disabilities in local languages, achieving 88–99% accuracy on most measures but only 58% on dyslexia screening, with no evidence of large-scale school deployment since 2019–2020. The Hiniduma Bio-Link Project uses Plan Vivo certification to pay smallholder farmers in Galle District to reforest home gardens with analog forestry, reconnecting rainforest fragments across a proposed 23,473-hectare biodiversity corridor.