Sri Lankan expatriate women highest generator of forex in the world

Remittances by Sri Lankan housemaids in the Middle East are among the highest in the world in terms of foreign exchange earned by women, an UNDP expert says. UNDP (Asia/Pacific) Chief of Policies and Programmes Omar Norman, speaking to The Sunday Times on the sidelines of a recent regional conference on poverty reduction, said there was no country in the world where such a high proportion of foreign exchange is earned by women. “Sri Lanka is even higher than the Philippines," he said. Sri Lanka has earned Rs 157 billion from women while men remitted only Rs 75.6 billion. Norman said that migration and foreign remittances are extremely essential for poverty reduction and the bulk of worker remittances and export earnings have been generated by local women.

Earlier participants of Asia Pacific countries who attended the Asia Pacific Regional conference on Local Poverty Reduction and Millennium Development Goals in Colombo recently lauded the country’s current GDP growth rate of 7.4 percent and the contribution of working overseas to swell the country’s foreign exchange earnings in the background of an armed conflict.

Norman said that Sri Lanka made a reasonable economic growth despite the ongoing conflict and inflation rate. Foreign reserves were up at $2.8 billion, from $2.5 billion in 2006. All these are conventional indicators of a booming economy, emboldening the claims that the Sri Lankan economy has not been "derailed" by the escalation in violence. However he said that Sri Lanka's poverty and unemployment levels are still high, and recent surveys show that income inequality is increasing.

He hailed Sri Lanka’s village empowerment “Gemidiriya” programme which facilitates community driven development through removing root causes of poverty by providing opportunities with information, decision making power and resource assistance to support self development.