On 30 April 2025, UNFPA Sri Lanka published a reflection by Ms Saroja Sivachandran, Executive Director of the Centre for Women & Development (CWD), in its series marking 30 years since the Beijing World Conference on Women.
In the piece, Saroja looks back at how three members of the Women’s Development Centre travelled from war-affected Jaffna — by boat to Colombo, then on to Beijing in 1995 — to join Sri Lanka’s national delegation. She describes how the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action shaped CWD’s programmes on livelihoods, land rights, legal and psychosocial support, leadership training and women’s political participation.
“This conference brought feminist thinking into our everyday activism — on women’s rights, leadership, and empowerment,” she writes. Thirty years later, she calls for stronger gender equality across every sector and for legal protections against sexual violence to be upheld.
Read the full article on the UNFPA Sri Lanka website.