Moving Out of Poverty in the Tea and Rubber Sectors in Sri Lanka

The Moving out of Poverty Estate Sector study carried out by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) during 2005, sought to inform the World Bank’s Sri Lanka Poverty Assessment (SLPA) and its global study on Moving out of Poverty: Understanding Growth and Freedom from the Bottom Up (MOP) .

The SLPA’s focus was drawn to the estate sector because the national poverty statistics released by the Department of Census and Statistics highlighted an increase in the head count index of poverty in the estates over the last 15 years, in contrast to a national trend of gradually reducing poverty. The MOP study is a global initiative by the Poverty Reduction Economic Management Unit of the World Bank which “aims to select 10-16 countries on the basis of four characteristics which are deemed to be especially important as determinants of the extent of poverty transitions and the way in which these transitions occur.” The CEPA study had two core research questions: Why has the estate sector shown increasing levels of poverty?, Why and how do some poor people move out of poverty and stay out of 
poverty while others fall into poverty or remain trapped in chronic poverty? This study uses the same definition of the estate sector as the Department of Census and Statistics: ‘Plantation areas, which are more than 20 acres in extent and having not less than 10 residential labourers’. It draws its data from a study of 20 tea and rubber plantations