Background
Priyanthi has been “working in development” for much too long. Her career seems to have taken a full circle – starting life as a junior researcher at the Marga Institute, Sri Lanka’s first Development Studies institute in the mid 1970s even before graduation, she is now the Executive Director of the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA), a ‘think tank’ that aims to be the leading provider of poverty analysis in Sri Lanka. Between those two milestones she has packed in many experiences that have helped mould her outlook on life and her working and management style. She has worked in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Yemen and Australia and has spent almost ten years in the UK, coordinating an international network. She currently complements her Sri Lanka work with short term international consultancies to retain a broader perspective. She is passionate about issues of justice and about fighting structural inequalities – whether they be inequalities relating to gender, to knowledge, to access to technology or to poverty and livelihoods. She sees her work with CommsConsult as a means to address the issues of inequality in access to information, and to challenge established knowledge hierarchies.