Srilanka, Feb. 22 -- The team at FactCheck.lk (a platform run by Verite Research) fact-checked six statements from President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's maiden budget speech for 2025. Of these, four statements were graded as True and two of them as Partly True.
Statement 1: "The country's poverty rate reached 25.9 per cent in 2023 according to World Bank (WB) estimates".
Fact-check: The president's claim that Sri Lanka's poverty rate was 25.9% in 2023 aligns with an estimate published by the World Bank (WB). However, this estimate is based on a different poverty line than the one used by Sri Lanka's Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) for official poverty measurements.
The WB uses a poverty line of USD 3.65 per day, adjusted for 2...