Charting a Path Out of Poverty

Posted: 23 March 2007

by Elizabeth Stevens

Oxfam research aids tsunami recovery in Sri Lanka, where women struggle to earn a living from coconut fiber.

On a steamy day in March 2007, a group of women from the Sri Lankan villages of Kadabaddegama and Gurubewila gathered in their temple meeting hall to talk to Oxfam about how they try to earn a living from coconut fiber.

For hours each day, these women turn tangled bundles of coir, the fiber of the coconut husk, into twenty-foot lengths of coarse, two-ply yarn, neatly coiled into skeins. Some buy the fiber from local millers; others have coir pits on the beach, where they leave coconut husks to soften for months before pounding, cleaning, and drying the fiber for spinning. The coir yarn is then sold to make a range of products, from doormats and brooms to geo-textiles designed to prevent erosion on steep hillsides.

Many of the women, like their mothers before them, have been coir workers since childhood. But when the Indian Ocean tsunami surged across the coast of Sri Lanka in December 2004, the coir industry came to a standstill. Coir workers were killed, coir mills were destroyed, and coir pit owners—reluctant to return to work on the beaches—abandoned their damaged pits.

“Before the tsunami, everyone in the village was engaged in the coir industry,” said J.R. Mallika, who spins coir yarn for a living. “After the tsunami, no one was interested in it any more.”

In an effort to help tsunami survivors restore their incomes, Oxfam helped repair damaged mills, paid wages to villagers while they restored the coir pits, provided spinning wheels to replace those that were destroyed, and helped spinners buy fiber and quickly return to work.

“If Oxfam had not intervened at that time, the coir industry would have been no more,” said O.G. Padmini.

But the industry is a troubled one: despite all their skills and hard work, coir workers earn little for their labor.

“We each spin about 50 skeins of yarn a day,” said Mallika. “Twenty-five in the morning and 25 in the evening.” Each skein sells for less than fifteen cents, and when the cost of husks and transportation are subtracted out, it’s clear that anyone relying on coir spinning for a livelihood is living in extreme poverty. Yet when asked what other opportunities exist for women in this area, coir worker D. Asoka replied simply, “just coir.”

As the emergency phase of the tsunami response drew to a close at the end of 2005, Oxfam turned its attention to the long-term effort to help coir workers in southern Sri Lanka raise their incomes above pre-tsunami levels.

“We realized early on that simply restoring the industry to its former state wouldn’t help us achieve our goal of helping the poorest tsunami survivors improve their standard of living,” said Vinisius Fernando, coir program officer for Matara District. “But before we could improve the industry, we needed to understand it better.

Oxfam first commissioned a coir market analysis, and then a more in-depth research study to analyze the supply chain and recommend ways to make the industry more sustainable and more profitable to workers at the bottom of that chain.

“The current system works to keep the poor poor,” says Upali Wickramasinghe, professor of economics at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura. “They receive small compensation for their labor.”

Wickramasinghe is one of a three-member team from the National Institute of Business Management (NIBM) that led the research effort. “We talked to people working in the field at all levels, and by talking to them we came to understand the inputs and outputs. We translated these into values generated at each level. This ‘value chain’ helped us generate ideas for increasing benefits to the people at the lowest level.”

With the NIBM study in hand, Oxfam program staff developed a five-year plan to help coir workers in the south wield far more power in the marketplace. Self-help groups, where women join together in small community organizations to buy raw materials and sell their products, play a central role.

“Before the tsunami, if we took yarns to sell and asked for twelve rupees (around twelve cents) for one skein, the trader would say ‘No. I can only give you five,’ and we were supposed to accept that price,” said coir worker P.D. Violet. “But now that we are in a group, we are confident and can get whatever price we name.”

The study pointed to the importance of introducing updated technology to keep southern Sri Lanka’s coir industry competitive, so with the help of an industrial engineer and a local craftsman, Oxfam designed and produced a motorized spinning wheel.

“We gave 57 self-help groups a chance to test it out, and almost everyone liked it,” says Fernando. Plans are now underway to help 30 self-help groups in the district of Matara purchase motorized wheels.

The research report also recommended that coir workers add more value to their products before selling them. Trainings and pilot programs are now being planned, and within a few months, many of the women who now spin coir may also be making finished coir products like door mats, brooms, and sacks for collecting tea leaves.

Thanks to early rehabilitation efforts and the women’s self-help groups, some of the coir workers in these villages are already earning more income than they did before the tsunami. There is a strong sense of camaraderie among the women and—with new technology and products on the horizon—a sense of hope that their economic futures may be brighter than their pasts.

“Now we can bargain and sell our products and get a better price,” said O.G. Padmini. “And now if one person has a family function, all the others in the group come to help. Our unity is stronger now than before. We have become a kind of family.”

Read a summary of the report.