• Dep. Mass Media Min. Dr. Kaushalya Ariyarathne notes efforts to integrate informal labour into nat’l labour stats, particularly of rural sector contribution 

Deputy Minister of Mass Media Dr. Kaushalya Ariyarathne highlighted the recognition of unpaid care work as a central component of Sri Lanka’s national economic policy. 

She noted that efforts are being made to integrate informal labour into national labour statistics, underscoring women’s vital contribution to the productive economy, particularly in the rural sector.

This was when she undertook an official visit to France to participate in the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policies on 22-23 October in Paris where she participated as a panelist in the First Plenary Session titled ‘10 Years of Feminist Foreign Policy: Resisting, Uniting and Acting in the Face of the Backlash’.

In her intervention, she observed that the world is at a critical juncture as the rights of women are being challenged as never before in a complex geopolitical world. She emphasised: “A truly feminist foreign policy must have the capacity to subvert not only dominant structures and values, but also our own assumptions within them, with questions of reflexivity, positionality, and intersectionality remaining central to feminist thought and leadership.”