There are fields in Anuradhapura that answer to no season. Chrysanthemums open. Fruit ripens. And the same hands return to tend them, day after day, year after year, not because the work is temporary, but because the women doing it have found, at last, a place they don't have to leave.

That place is AKASA Safe Home. Most of the women here arrived after surviving gender-based violence, carrying disabilities that make independence  a step harder to reach. AKASA didn't plan toward it. It built something else instead: a home for good.

The Association of Women with Disabilities or more commonly known as AKASA has worked from that understanding since 1993, when it began as a network of self-help groups for people with disabilities and their families. Its safe home is the only one of its kind in Sri Lanka: a shelter for women with disabilities who have nowhere else to turn, and nowhere else they need to go. Residents here, aged between 35 and 56, stay for life.

A different kind of livelihood support

Most programs that help SGBV survivors focus on rebuilding their income, assuming they will eventually leave, find work, independence, and move on. However, reality presents itself differently.  In the case of AKASA's residents, rather than train women for jobs they'd have to leave the shelter to do, which come with its own issues to their safety and limitations, AKASA built the job model into the shelter itself.

Today, rows of chrysanthemums and fruit trees grow on the grounds, tended daily by the women who live there, watering, planting, harvesting, season after season. It is a collective agri-business, run by AKASA, and it does more than put money in anyone's hands. It also helps cover the cost of keeping the shelter running. And for women whose disabilities and histories have often left them with little control over their own days, tending something living, and watching it grow, has become its own quiet form of healing.

Teaching that starts from where people are

None of this came easily. The Institute for Social Business, who were brought in to train residents in the basics of running a small agri-business, quickly found that a standard classroom wouldn't work here. So, training happened in the field instead, hands in the soil, lessons repeated as many times as needed. For women with mental disabilities, that meant extra patience, and time spent simply building trust before a single farming technique was taught.

The support didn't stop with the residents. The Industrial Services Bureau (ISB) worked alongside AKASA's own staff too, involving them directly in planning the business, so the knowledge would stay behind long after the training ended. This was all a part of the vision and support of the Government of Canada funded, ‘Ensuring Justice for Victim-Survivors of SGBV in Sri Lanka,’ project and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Sri Lanka, in collaboration with UNFPA Sri Lanka.

The Post-Shelter Economic Empowerment programme led by UNDP, supported the land preparation and the first business inputs, staying flexible enough to let AKASA and ISB shape the model around the realities of the shelter, rather than the other way around.

What the harvest has shown

Halfway through the project, three of the twelve original participants left AKASA to return to their families, the kind of outcome a shelter exists to make possible, even if it meant three fewer hands in the fields.

Among the nine who stayed, income rose noticeably. And across all twelve women, including those who'd already gone home, something else grew too: a new sense of hope and motivation, and in the quiet confidence of women who had rarely been asked what they were capable of.

Growing something that lasts

Cyclone Ditwah tore through the region recently, and the farm felt it as a reminder that a livelihood built on open ground is only ever as steady as the weather allows. Keeping AKASA's harvest reliable will mean deeper support in the basics: managing crops, controlling pests, timing the fertilizer, and handling what comes after harvest.

There's room to grow, too, in how the flowers and fruit reach the people who'd buy them. AKASA is known locally, but its sales still rise and fall unpredictably. Arrangements, potted plants, herbal drinks, dried fruit, event bouquets, small shifts toward value-added products worth more than raw produce, paired with steadier buyers and a stronger presence online, could turn a good season into a dependable one.

AKASA was never meant to be judged as a business alone, and it shouldn't be. What it has built is something more particular: a livelihood shaped entirely around the women it serves, rather than the other way around. Its future depends on partners willing to keep supporting climate-resilient farming, better market access, and the kind of steady support that understands exactly what's being grown on this ground. Not just flowers. A future for women, who were once told they'd never have one of their own choosing.