Staff Members

Kumudika Boyagoda

Role: PhD Student Email: kb96@waikato.ac.nz Location: K3.08 Contact: +64 7 838 4466 ext, 6781

Research Interests:

Kumudika is a lecturer attached to the Department of Demography, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. She is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Population Studies Centre and is jointly supervised by Professor Richard Bedford and Professor Jacques Poot at the Population Studies Centre and Dr Rachel Simon-Kumar from Societies and Cultures, University of Waikato.

Apart from her teaching at undergraduate level at the University of Colombo, Kumudika has been engaged in several research projects in Sri Lanka which have examined Poverty and fertility, Reproductive Health of Free Trade Zone Workers and Social Pension systems for the elderly.

Kumudika’s PhD focuses on Female Headed Households in Sri Lanka which shows an increasing trend and is highest in the South Asian Region. The study will be conducted in different urban and rural locations in Sri Lanka among different female heads; i.e. single, married, widowed, divorced and separated. Her primary focus will be on the heterogeneity of the female headed households with relation to composition, causes and consequences. The suggestion she is putting forward is that it is only when these households are studied at a disaggregated level that differentials in exposure to vulnerabilities and resilience become apparent. Therefore the study will confound the prevailing macro picture with relation to causes and solutions to women’s disadvantages in development. At a policy level an analysis of heterogeneity will influence policy makers to rethink focussing on a common denominator when targeting this emerging alternative family and household form.