S Manoharan, Senior Assistant Secretary to the President.
“Poverty is not just a lack of income; it is a deprivation of basic capabilities,” observed Amartya Sen.Poverty is not merely the absence of income. It is the absence of security, access, opportunity, dignity, and voice. It is shaped by education, health, livelihoods, infrastructure, safety, social protection, geography, climate, markets, and governance. When these interlinked factors interact across space and time, poverty ceases to be a problem that can be solved through a single programme or ministry. It becomes a wicked problem, one that resists linear solutions and demands systemic responses.
Sri Lanka’s Prajashakthi National Movement to Eradicate Poverty begins with this recognition. The Prajashakthi Management Information System (MIS) is not designed as a routine data platform. It is conceived as a governance system, one that enables the state and citizens to jointly understand, prioritize, and act upon complex, multidimensional poverty across all administrative levels, from the national to the village.
In public policy, wicked problems share common traits: they have no single cause or solution, evolve over time, generate unintended consequences, and are perceived differently by different actors. Solutions are judged not as right or wrong, but as better or worse. No single institution holds enough authority or knowledge to solve them alone. Poverty in Sri Lanka exhibits all these characteristics. A livelihood intervention may fail without transport access; infrastructure investment may not deliver outcomes without skills; welfare may ease hardship without reducing vulnerability. Most critically, poverty is experienced differently, even within the same village.
Traditional governance approaches, sectoral programmes, fragmented databases, and top-down targeting are ill-suited to this complexity. What is required instead is whole-of-government integration combined with whole-of-society participation, anchored in continuous learning.
Scale Changes Everything
Any serious poverty eradication effort must operate across more than 14,000 Grama Niladhari divisions. At this scale, manual coordination becomes unworkable, centralised micro-management is impossible, and uniform solutions lose effectiveness. Discretion-based decision-making can lead to uneven outcomes. The question, therefore, is no longer whether to use digital systems, but how to design them so they strengthen governance rather than replace it.
Prajashakthi MIS responds to scale not by simplifying reality, but by organising complexity, allowing patterns to emerge from village realities while keeping the overall national and sub-national picture connected. This shared view helps align resources, identify common priorities, and ensure that efforts by provinces, districts, and communities complement one another, without taking decision-making away from those closest to the ground.
The Prajashakthi vision, “A Thriving Nation – A Secure Life”cannot be achieved through isolated projects. Moving from vision to action requires answering three simple but powerful questions for every village: where it stands today, where it needs to go, and how that journey will be taken together. Addressing these questions calls for a village baseline, a pathway of improvement, and a governance mechanism that supports progress over time.
The village baseline is the cornerstone of Prajashakthi MIS. It captures the current status of a village as perceived by the community across the key Prajashakthi pillars, social environment, food security, supply chain management, human capital development, protection, and the production economy. These are measured through simple, understandable indicators that reflect how deprivations are actually experienced.
What makes this baseline transformative is not merely the data collected, but how it is generated. Information is gathered through participatory discussions and collective reflection, validated by the Community Development Council (CDC) in each Grama Niladhari Division, a community-led body responsible for identifying priorities, planning action, and monitoring progress. The baseline is owned by the village, updated periodically, and used not for comparison with others, but to track improvement against its own starting point. This shifts development from entitlement-based expectations to improvement-based governance.
From Scores to Shared Action
Indicators on their own are fragments. Prajashakthi MIS brings them together into scorecards that make progress visible, enable fair prioritization, and support planning at divisional and district levels. These scorecards are diagnostic, not punitive: a low score signals where support is needed, not failure. Over time, communities can see whether their collective effortstogether with state and partner support, are making a difference.
While poverty is experienced locally, policy decisions must be made at higher levels. Prajashakthi MIS aggregates village-level data into divisional, district, provincial and national views in ways that preserve local nuance, prevent extreme cases from being averaged away, and make regional disparities visible.
Poverty is deeply spatial, shaped by geography through access, isolation, exposure, and opportunity. Prajashakthi MIS therefore integrates GIS-based visualisation to show where deprivations cluster, how infrastructure gaps align with poverty, and where focused, mission oriented interventions may be needed. By turning numbers into maps, it enables more targeted, spatially informed governance.
Because the system is accessible across levels, communities can see what has been proposed and approved, administrators can trace decisions and delays, and national and subnational leadership can monitor outcomes. This shared visibility strengthens transparency, accountability, and evidence-based decision-making, shifting development from negotiation-driven processes to evidence-driven governance.
Democratic Innovation
Prajashakthi MIS is introduced gradually, beginning with simple, cloud-based forms that people already know how to use. This recognises existing levels of digital literacy and lowers barriers to participation. More complex processing happens in the background, allowing the system to evolve without overwhelming users. This step-by-step approach reflects an age-old insight from the Vedic period, known as Thula Arundhati Nyaya, where understanding begins with what is familiar and visible before gradually moving to what is subtle and complex.
By keeping technology simple and inclusive, Prajashakthi MIS does more than improve administration. It opens space for democratic innovation, enabling citizens to shape priorities, guide action, and hold the system accountable.
Taken together, Prajashakthi MIS functions as a listening system for citizen voice, a coordination mechanism for institutions, a learning platform for policy, and a navigation tool for national vision. Wicked problems cannot be solved once and for all; they can only be governed better over time. By listening to villages and governing as one system, Prajashakthi offers Sri Lanka a collective, adaptive pathway toward a more secure and dignified life for all.