Jayanthi Kuru-Utumpala (Sinhala: ජයන්ති කුරු උතුම්පාල, born 3 September 1979) is a Sri Lankan women’s rights activist with 20 years of experience and a rock climber / mountaineer for nearly as long.

She has worked at national, regional, and global levels as a technical advisor, advocate, trainer, researcher, and program manager on issues relating to gender, gender-based violence, sexuality, masculinity, women’s human rights, and more recently, women in sports.

Since returning from Everest, she has delivered over 500 motivational speeches, to schools, universities, clubs, professional sports teams, corporate entities, government, and non-governmental organizations, as well as the military and police.

She is currently the Gender and Human Rights Advisor at the Family Planning Association in Sri Lanka, working to address stigma and discrimination faced by people seeking HIV services, and is a co-creator of ‘Delete Nothing’ – a local web-based initiative aimed at addressing online gender-based violence in Sri Lanka.

Jayanthi serves on several boards and is the current Chairperson of the Women and Media Collective and the International Centre for Ethnic Studies.

After finishing her schooling, she joined the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute in 1999 to pursue a diploma in journalism and communication.

[4] She performed research on women's rights while pursuing her higher studies and has also has given motivational speeches aimed at empowering schoolgirls.

As part of her feminist activism, together with two other colleagues, she recently co-created Delete Nothing - an online platform aimed at documenting technology-related violence in Sri Lanka.

Kuru-Utumpala's summit also made Sri Lanka the fourth country in the world after Poland, Croatia and South Africa, from which a woman was the first person to reach the top of Mount Everest.