The Asian Development Bank’s Country Director for Sri Lanka has called for long-term resilience-building to be made a development priority, arguing that three decades of repeated shocks have left the economy structurally exposed and dependent on protective reform.
Shannon Cowlin said Sri Lanka had absorbed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the long internal armed conflict and Easter terrorist attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 economic crisis and most recently Cyclone Ditwah. The ongoing war in the Middle East had introduced fresh risks for an already fragile recovery, she added.
“Successive shocks have pushed many people into poverty and reversed hard-won development gains, including for families that were previously financially secure,” Cowlin said, adding that the crises had also exposed deep social vulnerabilities and long-standing weaknesses in the economy.
Cowlin acknowledged that the government’s response to the economic crisis — macroeconomic stabilisation, institutional reform and growth-model overhaul — had produced a “remarkable” rebound but cautioned that much of the agenda remained unfinished. Policies and programmes, she said, must be designed with flexibility, supported by contingency mechanisms and backed by social-protection systems that can be scaled rapidly during emergencies.
She also stressed targeted investment to strengthen the resilience of poor and vulnerable households, particularly women, children, older persons and persons with disabilities, and called for stronger institutions, clearer policy frameworks and greater digital integration to improve service delivery and monitoring.
The remarks land alongside a wave of ADB engagement with Sri Lanka in recent days, including the $200 million water and sanitation project just approved by Cabinet, the bank’s $50 billion Pan-Asia Grid Initiative framing and an earlier special update cutting Sri Lanka’s growth forecast to 4.7% on conflict-related drag.
Source: NewsFirst.
