Practical Action South Asia
Where we work
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.
Office structure
Practical Action regional office structure consists of thematic programmes, cross-cutting Research and Policy Unit, Communications Unit and administrative units. The three thematic areas are:
- Reducing vulnerability
- Making markets work for poor people
- Improving access to useful services and structures
These three thematic areas of work are supervised and guided by the three programme team leaders – Ranasinghe Perera, Jayantha Gunasekera and Ranga Pallawala.
- The Communications team headed by Ramona Miranda facilitates information sharing of the project experiences, profile raising and financial support for the organization.
- 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.
As of March 2010, Practical Action staff consists of 63 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.
Practical Action also has innovative ways of disseminating good practice:
- a technical enquiry service, Janathakshan;
- a resource centre on appropriate technology; and
- the Consulting arm which focuses on scaling up opportunities.
Networks
Practical Action is also an active member of many national and regional networks through which exchange of knowledge and advocating based on action research are carried out. 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
- Climate Action Network – South Asia
- Lanka Organic Agriculture Movement
History of Practical Action South Asia
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
