Video: The Story of Mutubanda 
South Asia Disaster Report 
Project news - March 2010 
Annual Report |
Practical Action South Asia
Working together with communities, Practical Action South Asia aims to build the technical skills of poor people in the region enabling them to improve the quality of their lives and that of future generations. Technologies can be useful only when they are designed to suit the social, economic, political and geographical realities of particular communities.
Contact us
Practical Action South Asia
5, Lionel Edirisinghe Mawatha
Kirulapone, Colombo 05
Sri Lanka
Tel: +94 11 2829 412 (... 413, 414, 415)
Fax: +94 11 2856 188
e-mail: practicalaction@practicalaction.org.lk
Sri Lanka regional office
The operations of Practical Action's regional office is spread across mainly in the southern, eastern, western, north western, parts of Sri Lanka, Kalahandi, Koraput, Ganjan, Nayagarh, Puri and Bubaneswar in Orissa state in India and Thal and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan.
The work carried out by Practical Action regional office in Sri Lanka is arranged under the following themes:
- Reducing vulnerability
- Making markets work for poor people
- Improving access to useful services and structures
The three areas of work are supervised and guided by the three programme team leaders – Ranasinghe Perera, Jayantha Gunasekera and Upali Pannilage. The programme implementation team that consist of project managers are responsible for managing the different projects that come under each broad theme area.
Work of the three teams are supported by an administrative, financial, personnel and IT teams that comprises of a group of dedicated support staff that take the responsibility for the day to day running of the organisation and the contractual arrangements with the clients, monitors the finances of the organisation and implements Practical Action IT system and policies.
The Communications unit of Practical Action South Asia facilitates information sharing of the project experiences, profile raising and financial support for the organisation. The communications team headed by Ramona Miranda. The Finance and Administration team headed by Chandrika Ramachandran supports the organisation by providing administrative services, IT facility and comprehensive financial data to the organisation. The Quality Assurance unit of the organisation unit provides support to the organization by giving inputs to evaluation and monitoring of projects and by liaising with donors and funding organizations.
Another important aspect of the support provided for the three teams is by a group of communication professionals that together form the third support system for the organisations projects and function as the Communication team. Together these professionals manage the library, resource center, Janathakshan website, provide support for the group website, and produce Practical Action’s publications, and other knowledge products like videos, posters and various exhibition material.
As of October 2007, Practical Action staff consists of 86 professionals from different multidisciplinary such as development planners, master trainers, social scientists, architects, sociologists, engineers, agriculturists, food technologists, IT and finance specialists, writers, translators, development communicators and visualisers etc. full staff list
Practical Action also works in close collaboration with a network of local partners, associates and experts. Some of the existing networks are:
- Development with Disabled Network
- Duryog Nivaran
- Energy Forum
- GAMANA network
- IMT manufacturers network
- Lanka Rainwater Harvesting Forum
- Lanka Forum for Rural Transport and Development
- Rural Enterprise network
