Piyumi Samaraweera

As Program Director – Feminist Leadership and Movements, Piyumi works on programs focused on Feminist Leadership and Movements supporting the team delivering on the Women Gaining Ground consortium as well as the programmatic work focused on East Africa. Her role supports CREA as it promotes, protects, and advances human rights and the sexual rights of all people by building leadership capacities of activists, allies and organizations.

Piyumi holds a Master of Science in Politics and Communications from London School of Economics and Political Science and has over 15 years of rich experience in executing innovative community and gender development strategies/programs underpinned by robust rights-based approaches. In her previous organization, she played a critical role in developing strong and resilient relationships with Womankind’s partners based in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Nepal, including through programme co-design, as well as programme and grant management. Most recently she led a team with delivering a FCDO funded land rights centric program in Uganda and authored this leaning paper: Solidarity through Sisterhood: Learning from the eco-feminist project, Participation and Opportunities for Women’s Economic Rights (POWER)

As a Sri Lankan-British feminist, and as someone who has lived, studied, and worked across Asia, the US, and the UK, Piyumi enjoys work that has a global outlook and is connected to women’s rights. Piyumi has a love for the arts and has starred as a lead in “Aksharaya”, a feature-length film that premiered at the San Sebastian film festival in 2005.