Transnational Elderly Care: Experiences of Care Receivers

The rising ageing population in Sri Lanka is creating anxiety at policy level because care of the elderly is a potential financial burden.

Moreover, the rising need for elderly institutional care systems indicate that international migration of caregivers is a reason for increasing pressure on public support systems.

Within this framework, though not in its entirety, ageing in Sri Lanka and its associated problems are viewed as a consequence of international migration. This situation gives comparatively little incentive for exploration of the interrelations between migration and ageing and certain blindness to the positive effects of transnational elderly care.

Although in Sri Lanka international migration and ageing have lead to extensive research, studies that amalgamate these two aspects are very rare, creating a dearth of literature that analyze transnational elderly care within the Sri Lankan context. Moreover, available literature on transnational elderly care focuses mainly on the caregiver’s experience, while the care-receiver is overlooked, thus obscuring the implications of transnational care as a two-way process.

Therefore, the research intends to understand the issues within the transnational dimensions of Sri Lanka’s two main elderly care systems, the family and the institutional care services and specifically the problems faced by care-receivers. The exploratory approach will involve in-depth interviews with elders supported by transnational relatives and would pay attention to gender and ethnic variations of the transnational elderly care-receiver’s experiences.

Hence, by focusing on a phenomenon with relatively little literature, the research will contribute significantly to the fields of transnational studies and gerontology.