The Aswesuma programme was born out of necessity. After the economic collapse of 2022, hundreds of thousands of families lost what little financial footing they had. The Government needed to act, and Aswesuma was the answer: a structured cash transfer scheme that placed money directly into the hands of the most vulnerable. That was the right call.

But welfare, by design, must have a direction. It cannot simply be a monthly deposit that continues indefinitely while the underlying conditions that caused poverty remain unchanged. The news that nearly 100,000 Aswesuma beneficiary families have now begun earning a stable income through alternative support programmes is genuinely encouraging. It is also a reminder of how much further this country still needs to go.

The Government has stated its intention to gradually phase out Aswesuma payments between 2027 and 2029, in line with commitments made to the International Monetary Fund. Deputy Minister Wasantha Piyathissa has been candid enough to admit the obvious: that many beneficiaries are still not financially stable enough for payments to stop. That honesty is welcome. What is less welcome is the absence of a visible, public framework to bridge that gap.

This is where Sri Lanka's welfare conversation needs to grow up. Phasing out payments is not the goal. Lifting families permanently above the poverty line is. Those are two very different things, and conflating them is how Governments end up with good press releases and worsening inequality.

The alternative support programmes on offer, which include vocational training, grants, small-scale agricultural support, Japanese language learning for overseas employment, and referrals to employment centres, are reasonable in scope. But reasonable scope is not the same as systematic delivery. Sri Lanka needs to know, in concrete terms, what proportion of existing beneficiaries have crossed a credible income threshold. It needs KPIs, published quarterly, that track not just exits from the programme but sustained income levels six months and twelve months after exit. A family that earns enough in March to be removed from Aswesuma but has collapsed back into poverty by October has not been helped. It has been moved off a spreadsheet.

The selection problems and misuse allegations that continue to dog the programme are also not a sideshow. If families who qualify are excluded whilst ineligible households receive payments, the entire moral basis of the scheme is undermined. If recipients are spending allowances on consumption that does nothing to build household stability, that is partly a design failure, not simply a moral failing on the part of recipients. The programme needs structured guidance, not condescension, on how funds can be channelled towards productive use.

Sri Lanka is not the first country to wrestle with these tensions. Conditional cash transfer programmes across South and Southeast Asia have demonstrated that welfare works best when it is paired with accountability, not punitive accountability, but the kind that asks: has this intervention actually changed the trajectory of this family’s life? That question requires data, and that data must be made public.

The communities most in need of Aswesuma are also the communities least able to advocate for themselves when the programme fails them. Low-income Tamil, Sinhala, and Muslim families in the North, South, and estate sectors do not share identical vulnerabilities. A one-size policy applied without sensitivity to regional and communal differences will leave pockets of poverty untouched regardless of how well the national numbers look.

The Government deserves credit for acknowledging, through this programme, that poverty is a structural problem requiring a structural response. Now it must go further. Welfare that ends at exit is welfare that has done only half its job. The finish line is not when a family leaves Aswesuma. The finish line is when that family no longer needs it, and never will again.

That requires ambition. It requires measurement. And it requires the political will to hold this programme to account in public, not just in IMF review documents.

Sri Lanka can do this. But not without honesty about where it actually stands.