Mitura

Sri Lanka is currently embroiled in a humanitarian crisis caused by rising inflation. This is affecting the everyday lives of its citizens, especially the vulnerable middle class households who have come to be known as the New Poor.

For the purpose of this project, we focused on the reasons the New Poor is exempted from initiatives targeted at nutrition package deliveries undertaken by the Sri Lankan government. By conducting interviews with policy experts and local organisations to investigate the situation. We discovered the root cause to be limitations in data collection and information. To solve this, we have designed an initiative, Mitura, that collects data on the vulnerable middle class households with the aim of coordinating the distribution of nutrition packages to the affected households, as well as encouraging financial and volunteer aid.

This platform is expected to improve the efficiency of current efforts to get food to the vulnerable Middle class, by providing a safe and anonymous platform for them to seek help without sacrificing their dignity. Our focus was on localisation of technology to contextualise our platform within the existing socio-cultural values of the Northern Province. The program involves a bottom up approach by empowering the new poor and close collaboration with grass root collectives like Public Health Midwives. With the continuous usage of this initiative, the government and humanitarian foundations will have a regular up-to-date centralised database for these marginalised populations and any other social groups they have little to no information or data on.