US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented the Women of Courage award to Sri Lanka’s Jansila Majeed at a ceremony held at the US State Department in Washington, Wednesday. Majeed was among 10 recipients of the 2010 award. US First lady Michelle Obama also attended the event and delivered a speech.

Ms. Majeed is the Managing Trustee of Community Trust Fund in Puttalam province. The Trust oversees a number of programs on minority and women’s issues, including women’s rights, peace building, relief work, working with young people, and mine-risk education in the North and East. Ms. Majeed’s own particular focus is on uniting the Muslim and Tamil communities in her province.

Having lived as an internally displaced person (IDP) for almost 20 years, Ms. Majeed has become an energetic activist for services for displaced Muslim and Tamil civilians, focusing particularly on grassroots programs on life skills, health, and women's empowerment. Her activism began in 1992 with a working group of five people. She overcame both the general neglect of the problem of IDPs in the Muslim minority as well as her own community’s strictures against women activists to build a broad-based organization that works on minority and women’s issues in a highly sensitive and politicized environment.  (Daily Mirror online)


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