Sri Lanka’s Manel Jayasinghe has been named among the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations’ 100 Women Heroes in Agrifood Systems and Rural Development, NewsFirst reported at 1.06 p.m. on Sunday.
She is one of 100 women selected from 609 nominations submitted by 131 FAO member countries.
Who she is
Jayasinghe is a community leader and advocate for rural women’s empowerment who leads the Arunodaya Women Farmers’ Society.
Through that organisation she supports women farmers in strengthening their agricultural work, improving livelihoods, and increasing their participation in community development and decision-making. NewsFirst reports that her leadership has helped build cooperation among rural women, promote sustainable farming practices, and widen economic and social inclusion in her community.
The initiative
FAO launched the 100 Women Heroes programme to mark the International Year of the Woman Farmer 2026. It recognises women whose work has strengthened agriculture, expanded market access, protected natural resources, preserved traditional knowledge, and created jobs and training in rural communities.
The selection ran in stages: nominations were screened for eligibility and country quotas, ranked by FAO senior management, shortlisted through leadership deliberations, and approved by the organisation’s Senior Leadership Committee.
A note on sourcing
This article is single-sourced, which is unusual for this desk. A corroboration pass found no second verified Sri Lankan newsroom carrying the award at the time of writing.
FAO’s own newsroom has published the announcement, and that page would be the primary record. It could not be fetched from this host — the request returned HTTP 403 — so no publication date could be extracted for it, and under this site’s sourcing rule a source without a verifiable date is not cited. The initiative’s existence and Jayasinghe’s inclusion were separately confirmed through search results referencing FAO’s own pages; the detail above is drawn from the NewsFirst filing.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not say where in Sri Lanka Jayasinghe farms or where the Arunodaya Women Farmers’ Society operates, how large its membership is, or how long she has led it. Her age, her crops and the length of her career are not given.
Nothing reports who nominated her, whether other Sri Lankans were among the 609 nominations, or whether any formal ceremony or recognition event is planned. No comment from Jayasinghe herself, from the Ministry of Agriculture or from the FAO country office is carried.
Source: NewsFirst.
