The DosageStories
News, explainers and dispatches from the making of Edition 01. Every number is sourced.
AboutThe Dosage
A Sri Lankan publication telling one story per edition, in full. Printed to keep, with a film layer behind every page.
From the editor
I went home for a holiday and stayed for two years. I watched the collapse reach my own family.
My father's food import business didn't survive it. I made it back to Australia. The Dosage returns to tell the other side of the recovery, carefully and in full.
Eashaan Dassanayaka, Editor
How we work
Our stories come from real people, interviewed by reporters on the ground. We use AI tools to help with research, data and drafting, and every fact is checked before it's published.
The Dosage is a publication by Extract and Design, a film and design studio working between Colombo and Melbourne.
← Stories
The Dosage is back
One story per edition, told in full. Printed to keep, with everything else a scan away.
NewsEashaan Dassanayaka12 October 2026
We went quiet. Sri Lanka didn't. Since The Dosage last published, the country has been through a fuel crisis, a default and a long, uneven recovery. We've come back to report it properly.
The new Dosage works differently. Each edition is one story, followed all the way through, instead of fifty short pieces. It's printed as a slim, collectible edition. Point your phone at any page and the story opens up: the film, the voices, and the numbers explained simply.
What's next
Edition 01 is in the works. Until then, we'll be publishing regular stories about Sri Lanka here: explainers, the numbers behind the headlines, and the people living them.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to be first to see the launch date.
Reality, unfiltered.
← Stories
Sri Lanka's recovery, in four numbers
The World Bank says the economy is back. The same report shows why many families don't feel it.
The gapThe Dosage12 October 2026
In October 2026 the World Bank published its latest update on Sri Lanka, titled From Recovery to Transformation. Read the headline and the story is good. Read further and a second story appears.
12straight quarters of economic growth
4.4%growth forecast for 2026, up from 3.6% in April
~12%how far real wages remain below 2019
15.8%of people below the $4.20-a-day poverty line in 2026, against 11.5% in 2019
Why both are true
Growth measures the size of the whole economy. It can rise while wages, measured against prices, stay below where they were. Prices are also moving again: headline inflation reached 8% in August, even though the Bank expects it to average 5.7% for the year.
The country is recovering faster than the people inside it.
Source: World Bank, Sri Lanka Development Update (October 2026), as reported by the Daily FT.
← Stories
What happens when a country can't pay?
Explained simply: the dollar jar, the default, and why the fuel queues began.
ExplainedThe Dosage12 October 2026
You've probably heard that Sri Lanka "ran out of money" in 2022. That isn't quite right. It had rupees, and could print more. What it ran out of was dollars.
The dollar jar
Sri Lanka buys fuel, medicine and many foods from abroad, and the sellers want dollars. So the country keeps a jar of them: its foreign reserves. Tourism, exports and money sent home by Sri Lankans abroad fill the jar. Repaying foreign loans empties it.
When tourism collapsed in the pandemic and loan repayments kept coming, the jar ran low. Ships carrying fuel waited offshore to be paid, and queues formed at every station.
The default
In April 2022 Sri Lanka told its foreign lenders it would stop repaying them for now. That is a default. Picture a family announcing at a wedding that it can't pay back any relative this year: everyone hears, and nobody lends again until there's a plan.
A default isn't a technicality. It's the moment the whole world stops lending.
The plan came later, through an IMF programme and a long negotiation with lenders. We'll explain each of those steps in the next stories in this series.
An explainer by The Dosage.
← Archive
From the archive: The First Ride
Before cycling was a movement in Sri Lanka, The Dosage was there.
ArchiveThe Dosage
Our first issue led with a story nobody else was covering: a small group of riders who had started cycling around Sri Lanka together, long before it became a community across the island.
We covered it in print and on film, with a video behind every story that readers could reach by scanning the page. It was ahead of its time. The new Dosage picks up that idea and builds it properly.