Some of the women at the Women's Development Centre in Kandy arrived as girls. Many still are. Survivors of early pregnancy, deception, sexual abuse, family rejection, with the youngest girl just seventeen, and the oldest fifty-one. Most of their stay measured in years, not months.

For girls this young, with families that may never take them back due to social stigma, the usual advice of, “start a business”, “find your independence”, doesn't quite fit sometimes. In this light, the Women's Development Centre (WDC) built a path with a gentler slope. Before anyone is asked to stand entirely on her own, she gets to practice standing inside a place that will catch her if she stumbles.

Learning to earn, one product at a time

That practice ground has a name: ‘Sthree Marketplace’, WDC's own social enterprise. Inside the shelter, survivors make cardboard bags, sweets and food items, carpets, wool bands; products sold under a protected brand, to a market that doesn't require a survivor to face a customer alone. For girls who transition out of care, the work shifts too, toward carpet-making and sewing at village or estate level, a gradual step from the shelter's marketplace toward the wider world.

<add in about the Post Shelter EE project and donor details>

 The Post-Shelter Economic Empowerment Support programme, led by UNDP, worked directly with WDC's own staff, not just the residents, bringing them into the planning of Sthree Marketplace itself so that the knowledge of how to run it would stay behind long after any single training ended. This was all part of the vision and support of the Government of Canada funded, "Ensuring Justice for Victim-Survivors of SGBV in Sri Lanka," implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Sri Lanka, in partnership with UNFPA Sri Lanka.

Training runs over four days, covering the basics of business planning and financial literacy, from banking, bookkeeping alongside sessions on mental wellbeing, because for many of these young women, confidence had to be built before a business ever could. WDC's own vocational facilities, in sewing, baking, and handicrafts, mean the learning doesn't stop when the formal training ends.

The results bear this out in the pilot project report. . The marketplace offered a wider market reach, offering a protected sales outlet for those survivors who were not yet ready to access external markets independently. Survivors’ whose work remained connected to Sthree Marketplace, with its structured production and steady sales channel, consistently outperformed those working alone.

Three groups, three different roads ahead

Of the twenty women WDC supported, results varied. Seven achieved strong income progress, nine made moderate gains, and four couldn't be fully assessed by the end of the pilot, in part because the women hardest to track are often the ones who've left the shelter or have the least capacity to sustain repeat business activity.

Within the fourteen women still in shelter care, a clear split emerged. Ten showed strong potential and could realistically be fast-tracked toward economic independence before leaving, with continued technical training, business knowledge, and confidence-building. The remaining four, mostly in poultry and agriculture, hadn't found stable revenue, and needed further close mentoring, along with a review if their choice was to pivot to something else completely. 

The two women who'd already left the shelter face a different risk of stalling without suffient hand-holding support. They would need active connections to steady buyers and local markets to keep their progress from quietly slipping backward.

And then there are the four elderly residents, for whom a full-scale business was never really the point. What they need instead is something lower-intensity and collective, economic inclusion shaped around what their bodies and their days can actually hold.

What holds it all together

All twenty women, regardless of the various outcomes, reported one thing in common: a real rise in confidence. That may be the truest measure of what Sthree Marketplace was built to do, not to turn every young survivor into an entrepreneur overnight, but to give her a place to practice believing she could be one, long before anyone asked her to prove it out in the world alone.