The Impact Global NGO challenge is to address widespread exploitation of labour amongst Sri Lankan factory workers, who are both not allowed to unionise and lack knowledge of their legal rights. Traditional methods of knowledge transfer are not working for this community, and the lack of computer literacy make it hard to both supply Sri Lankan female assembly workers with the tools they need to demand their legal rights and the ability to communicate with other workers to advocate for their rights as a community. The NGO challenge is also to foster and offer support for community leaders (what the NGO calls ‘change agents’) from within the factory workers to create long term change.
We will empower workers with computer literacy skills to increase communication within the group and connect them to transnational solidarity networks. Online platforms and community sharing have mobilised Sri Lankans recently on political activism against government injustice, and we can build upon this interest to help mobilise factory workers rights.
Our project will be essentially one of co-creation, using pedagogy of the oppressed where we will use their lived experiences of workers to gather their preferences and needs. We will work at all stages with the community itself to build interactive and participatory workshops and technologies through interactive gamification to facilitate leaders within the community, and develop communication tools that are sustainable after the end of the project.
Project members
- School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex
- East 15 Acting School, University of Essex
- Department of Sociology, University of Essex
- Impact Global NGO
Team members
Acknowledgements
Financial support provided by the University of Essex Impact Acceleration Account NGOs and VCSEs Challenge Lab under grant agreement No. CLSH22.
