Sri Lanka
Chevaan Daniel (Sri Lanka 2017) oversees News 1st, Sri Lanka’s largest independent news network of TV and radio stations. It is a subsidiary of the Capital Maharaja Organization, which includes renewable energy, national security and infrastructure businesses. While on fellowship, he studied effective ways to address humanitarian crises and natural disasters.
With his media colleagues, he began to expose what poverty has looked like throughout Sri Lanka because it had not been reported before by major media in the country. His group partnered with local universities to present comprehensive data and statistics on poverty levels, providing it as a resource to the government and the United Nations. But unfortunately, neither the country nor the United Nations took action. This was when they decided to take matters into their own hands with Project Gammadda (Heart of the Village), an initiative that Daniel created to address poverty and suffering in Sri Lanka. One such project, out of Project Gammadda’s 2,000 micro-projects, was completed recently in Matara, rural southern Sri Lanka. The project brings clean drinking water to the 100 students of the Aparekka Kanishta Primary School, which had operated for 80 years without access to clean water. EF president George de Lama spoke at the project’s inauguration in February.
Click here to learn more about the project at the Aparekka Kanishta Primary School.
Listen to Daniel tell his story here.