For 30 years, Women In Need (WIN) has worked to end violence against women and girls in Sri Lanka. Its shelters in Colombo, Matara, and Batticaloa offer emergency safety and crisis care. 

In Anuradhapura and Colombo, WIN ran two distinct models for the same goal: helping survivors, most in their thirties to fifties, rebuild an income of their own after leaving shelter care. One model narrowed in on a single trade. The other opened the door to almost anything.

This is a key initiative funded by the Government of Canada, ‘Ensuring Justice for Victim-Survivors of SGBV in Sri Lanka,’ project and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Sri Lanka, in partnership with UNFPA Sri Lanka

Anuradhapura: mastering one craft

In Anuradhapura, ten survivors were rebuilding their lives after domestic violence and marital breakdown, many still living in dependent arrangements, a family home or a relative's house that offered shelter but not always freedom. With rural markets in mind, WIN chose focus over variety, training survivors deeply in a single trade: tailoring.

The training ran further than most: a four-day business course covering planning, bookkeeping, and digital marketing, followed by thirteen additional days of advanced tailoring instruction. That depth showed. Eight of the ten survivors started individual businesses, and five saw real, significant income growth, moving beyond basic stitching into specialized, higher-value work, school uniforms, wedding attire, bedsheets and pillowcases, and seasonal clothing made to order.

What separated the thriving businesses from the struggling ones wasn't talent alone. The women who succeeded diversified their product range, built confidence in pricing and costing, and found their way to steadier customer networks. The ones who struggled were often stretched thin, juggling tailoring alongside home gardening or food preparation, their hours squeezed by caregiving responsibilities, and working capital too thin to absorb a slow month. One survivor, held back by low confidence and an unsteady customer base, needed psychosocial support as much as business training.

Across nearly every business here, the same gap remained: little structured bookkeeping, with most sales still confined to the village. Reaching further, toward nearby towns, institutional bulk orders like school uniform contracts, coupled with digital promotion, is the clearest path to turning a good season into a lasting one.

Colombo: choosing your own path

Ninety kilometres away, WIN's Colombo shelter told a different story. Here, survivors were navigating a different kind of hardship: domestic and intimate partner violence layered with the pressures of city life: high rents, fierce competition, and the constant looming need for stable income.

With a bigger market on their doorstep, WIN let survivors choose their own path rather than train everyone in one trade. Businesses sprang up across food production, catering,  sewing and tailored garments, cupcakes and savoury boxes, wholesale jujubes, dried fish, and spice blends. Seven of the ten survivors started individual businesses, and five achieved significant income growth, most of them through food avenues.

WIN went further than simply training and facilitating seed funding through the pilot project. It helped survivors formalise securing Divisional Secretariat registrations for several food producers, and supported one toward Export Development Board certification, a real step toward growth beyond the local market.

Even with strong early progress, the needs ahead are familiar: costing and pricing discipline, expense tracking, and structured savings. To grow further, survivors need customer networks that extend past their immediate circle, digital promotion, and connections to bulk or wholesale buyers, along with the ongoing psychosocial support that makes it possible to manage a business and a recovery at the same time.

One organisation, two answers

Neither model is more right than the other, they're simply built for and catered tor where the women live. In Anuradhapura, depth in a single trade gave survivors a real shot at mastery. In Colombo, breadth let each woman meet the market on her own terms. What both share is a harder truth: starting a business is rarely the finish line. For most of these women, the real work takes place now; pricing it right, maintaining the books, and finding the next customer, is only just beginning.