In this blog post, IDS student Yasara Kannangara reflects on her unconventional path from studying literature to engaging in policy work in Sri Lanka to ultimately pursuing the MA Poverty, Policy and Development Practice at IDS (class of 2025-26). She shares how her lived experience of national crises and her master’s studies have deepened her understanding of poverty’s complex role in development.
Looking at my CV, an outsider would see a series of pivots that, to them, might seem disconnected. But to me, my path makes perfect sense.
My journey into development, and more so into poverty, started somewhat unconventionally. I completed my undergraduate degree in English Literature and at the time I was constantly reminded, by family, peers, and well-meaning advisors, that literature was not considered a ’viable’ or ’practical’ discipline.
In response, but also out of genuine curiosity, I pursued a concurrent programme in Development Studies. The two programmes were very different but also complementary in a way that I did not expect. It was through literature that I first explored the ideas of intersectionality, postcolonialism, and gender. While one was fiction, the other was the world around me. I also minored in Sociology and Geography. My research background was primarily qualitative. This background formed the foundations of how I understand poverty, power and policy.
Poverty: the silent variable
My interest in poverty began as I progressed through my career. I started teaching postcolonial literature at a state university in Sri Lanka, which was pivotal for my next role as a Policy Analyst at the Presidential Secretariat of Sri Lanka, where I started working on national education policy. They wanted someone who had real experience in teaching at the state university system but that also had knowledge of policy. I went on to work at an environmental consultancy (focusing on provincial climate adaptation plans in Sri Lanka), and then at UNDP, where I worked on a project towards ensuring justice for victim-survivors of gender-based violence.
Having worked in a variety fields – from gender, environment and education -I’ve noticed that poverty is often a cross-cutting theme. Poverty is always present, but it is rarely explicitly named. Yet, at the same time, poverty shapes every outcome. It determines whose livelihoods are protected, whose voices are excluded, and whose lives are considered ’viable’ under policy trade-offs.
It was through these experiences that I realised that poverty was the silent variable underlying decisions about sustainability, justice, gender, and growth. It explained why fishermen struggled to adopt sustainable practices, why rural communities could not access formal justice, and why policy success on paper often failed in practice. And ultimately, this made me aware that in much of the work we do poverty is often treated as background noise.
This awareness deepened through my work, particularly on ensuring justice for victim-survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Here, the link between poverty and injustice was impossible to ignore. Legal remedies, psychosocial support, and institutional protections mean very little when survivors are economically dependent on their perpetrators or trapped in precarious livelihoods. Justice, I learned, often becomes a luxury, available only to those who can afford time, safety, and stability.
Critical reflections on framings and understandings of poverty
While ‘No Poverty’ is technically Sustainable Development Goal 1, my exposure to international development practice left me with the uncomfortable sense that poverty has become almost unfashionable in the field of development studies. Instead, the focus has shifted to issues such as climate change, which, while important, are framed as more pressing issues than poverty. In this, poverty has shifted from being viewed as a primary structural condition to a checkbox that is acknowledged but never fully addressed.
For someone like me, who did not enter development through economics, this gap was striking. This was made more apparent when put into context of the 2022 Sri Lankan economic crisis, which resulted in the country going into sovereign default. It was at this point that many of us in the country became extremely familiar with economic jargon – sovereign default, debt restructuring, foreign reserve depletion all became terms that were thrown around in newspapers, social media and general everyday conversation.
The economic crisis fundamentally shifted changed how I looked at development, and how I understood vulnerability. I realised that much of our work takes for granted stability in a country, allowing us to more easily identify vulnerable communities. The crisis exposed how systems and securities I had long taken for granted – stable access to food, fuel, education, healthcare, and even dignity in everyday life – were in fact highly fragile and unevenly distributed. It was at this point that I began to recognise poverty not as a static condition experienced by a fixed group of people, but as a dynamic and pervasive risk, one that could rapidly engulf those who had once considered themselves insulated from economic shocks.
Choosing the MA Poverty, Policy & Development Practice
When selecting a development master’s to study, I came across the Master’s in Poverty, Policy and Development Practice by accident. However, when I read the course description and did my research into the programme, I concluded that this was the direction I wanted to pursue.
Finding the degree may have been an accident, but choosing the MA Poverty, Policy and Development Practice at IDS was a deliberate decision. I did not want a generic development studies degree that treated poverty as one issue among many. I wanted to study poverty while learning how to engage with economic frameworks without abandoning the qualitative lens that shapes my thinking.
As I read the course description, IDS stood out to me as a place that took seriously the tensions I was already grappling with, between disciplines, methods, and ways of knowing. It felt like a programme that did not treat poverty as an abstract policy problem, but as something political, relational, and embedded in everyday life. Now, after one term at IDS, that initial sense has proven to be true.
Coming from a background in literature and policy, I have become increasingly aware of how development work can privilege certain forms of knowledge while muting lived experience. At IDS I am learning how to engage with data, economics, and policy design without losing sight of the very people those frameworks are meant to serve.