Friday, June 5, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA: Villagers Help Themselves To A Road
Feizal Samath
- Young women and men, used bare hands and newly-acquired skills to galvanise a village in southern Sri Lanka to turn a narrow hilly track into a motorable road.
It took a year’s hard work for the 275 families of the poor, hill village of Kohugoda to build the 1.5 km road to the nearest motorable road – a feat that has won them wide praise and admiration.
“Some villages in other areas have also shown interest in our work,” exults Sisira Premaweera, one of the pioneers of the road-building project.
Like Kohugoda, 30 km from Galle on Sri Lanka’s southern tip, many villages in this district have been overlooked by the government’s road-building department. Villagers walk miles to the nearest market, balancing loads on their head or back, on tracks broad enough only for walking single file.
Most villages are not connected with electricity, and since they are off the road network, they have not been provided with schools, hospitals, markets to sell their produce.
Galle district is traditionally tea-growing, Sri Lanka’s prized export, but villagers here barely eke a living from plots never larger than two acres. Their earnings are not enough to feed, clothe and educate children.
Sandhya Premawansa, 21, recalls how Kohugoda villagers had to carry the 30 to 40 kg loads of tea to the collecting centres, “many kilometres away as vehicles could not come to our village.
Five young villagers including Premawansa and Premaweera were given a crash-course in road building. “We formed ourselves into an organisation – the Suhada Ekamuthu (Cordial Unity) Road Development Society,” said Premawansa.
Two Nepali consultants were brought in to share their experience in road construction in the Himalayas with the five- member group during the five-day training workshop. The consultants stayed on to guide the road building process.
The five were taught how to cut mountains, make slopes, construct culverts and break large rocks without disturbing the environment. The technology taught was simple, effective and cheap – using community resources.
A bulldozer was engaged from the village council for the difficult areas but most times it was the villagers – women and men – who gouged the road out of the hillside with pick-axes and shovels.
Initially the women were reluctant to get involved. But as work progressed their participation rose to 40 percent of the some 260 people involved in building the road.
According to an ITDG spokesperson, all the construction work – except for rock blasting and construction of some sections of the retaining walls, which required specially skilled workers – was done by the community.
ITDG paid the workers half the daily agricultural wage of 200 rupees (less than three dollars) daily to compensate for the loss of regular income.
Each worker was made to contribute 10 rupees daily to a society fund, which has now accumulated to 50,000 rupees in a local bank. The money is loaned at low interest rates to members.
Villagers contributed in all sorts of ways to ensure the success of the road building enterprise. Some gave up sections of their land to the road, others provided bags of cement, stones and sand, while bare hands, farm tools and community effort did the rest.
“We are hoping to officially open the road in July,” confided Premaweera, 25, who has a diploma in agriculture.
Enthused by their success, the founder members of the society plan to build another road that will link their village to another small settlement above Kohugoda. They hope the villagers will again volunteer labour and materials, and “a kind NGO” chip in with the money, says Premaweera.
For now, Kohugoda is looking forward to enjoying the road the village completed in February this year, with help from a non- governmental organisation.
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DEVELOPMENT-SRI LANKA: Villagers Help Themselves To A Road
Feizal Samath
- Young women and men, used bare hands and newly-acquired skills to galvanise a village in southern Sri Lanka to turn a narrow hilly track into a motorable road.
(more…)
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