Sri Lanka wins top South Asia Rotary award

The Head of PR for Sri Lanka Dr. Rohantha Athukorala with 2018/19 District Governor Soza and Past International Rotary President K. Ravindran 

Rotary, the only service organisation which has a non-voting seat at the UN General Assembly with over 1.2 million members, staged its Annual Regional Performance Awards for 2018/19 in Indore, India last week, drawing the attendance of International Rotary President Mark Daniel Maloney and the top 500 key leaders of Rotary for South Asia. 

Sri Lanka’s Rotary President for 2018/19, Dushan Soza, was awarded the top award for ‘Rotary Image Building’. 

The year under review was a milestone for Rotary in Sri Lanka and the Maldives under the dynamic leadership of Soza, with the organisation managed like a corporate entity as per the stipulation of Rotary International.  

2018/19 Rotary District Governor Dushan Soza

In 2018/19, for the first time all projects were monitored through a Balance Scorecard perspective, which was entirely online, where it was revealed that an average Rotarian spends 11% of their time daily on Rotary projects.

“It was an amazing year where Rotary as a team drove innovative products, with media exposure crossing over Rs. 70 million. The main KPI was the new membership crossing 400, which made the year stand out amidst the 90-year-old history of Rotary in Sri Lanka. I must acknowledge the leadership that our public image Chairman Dr. Rohantha Athukorala and his team demonstrated in making Rotary a top-of-mind brand in the community during my year.”

Incidentally, this was the second time that Sri Lanka was awarded the coveted award. In 2014/15 too, Sri Lanka won the ‘Best Image Building’ prize at the South Asian Zonal Awards under the Governorship of Gowri Rajan. Incidentally, that year too the PR Chairman for Sri Lanka was Athukorala. In both years, Athukorala went on to be awarded the ‘Exceptional Rotarian’ Award for Sri Lanka, said Soza. 

During the 2018/19 period, Rotary initiated and partnered the Sri Lankan Government on several landmark projects – the innovative dengue eradication new product ‘Ovi Trap’, which is at a test market stage in the Grandpass area, the flagship Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Project, the novel English teaching product MasterSpeller, the one million tree-planting project partnering UN Global Compact agricultural company Hayleys Plantations as well as many other initiatives relating to tourism revival in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka. This includes global initiatives and the fully-automated tracking of each of the roughly 70 Rotary clubs across the country.