Sri Lanka

There are thousands of children in Sri Lanka who have never known the safety of a place they can call “home.” Chased out by violence during the 26-year civil war and then by the 2004 tsunami, thousands of families cannot remember a time they were not living in tents.

LWR first set up emergency relief operations in Sri Lanka in the wake of the December 26, 2004 tsunami. We stayed to establish recovery and development programs through the last years of the country’s civil war. We have pledged to continue supporting several local partners in projects throughout Sri Lanka until we meet our goal: to help people not only recover from their loss, but build better, more resilient livelihoods.

An important part of our mission here is to establish homes for people in the hard-hit region of Batticaloa. Violence forced 20,000 people from here to flee their homes; the tsunami wiped out 50,000 more. With no means to start anew, Batticaloans have had to live for years in shelters without sanitation, sufficient food or clean water, and with no sense of security that makes a home feel like home. The camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) are no place to raise a child.

Thanks to LWR’s work, many farmers, fisherman and families in Batticaloa now have a safe to call a place home. One woman who rebuilt her house, doing much of the work herself with the support of our partner’s technical team, told us, “I never even hoped for this kind of house.”

Your donations help LWR end injustice and human suffering in Sri Lanka.

• Supporting almost 56,000 IDPs (families who were forced out their homes by war) with food and water, counseling and education

• Building secure houses with lockable doors and windows, proper latrines and safe wells
• Providing entrepreneurship training in technical skills (i.e. tailoring, pottery, seed cultivation, milk processing or fish processing) along with business skills like basic accounting and saving — marketable skills that mothers can then pass on to their children
• Helping households headed by women increase their incomes, so they can cover family health emergencies and send their children to school
• Encouraging and educating oppressed groups of people like women and Dalits (once called untouchables) to speak up for their rights and empower themselves

• Establishing Village Livelihood Groups, to whom we provide training in planning and management skills
• Helping these groups establish disaster risk reduction programs to protect all that their communities have rebuilt

20.303.477
TOTAL POPULATION

$1,990
GNI* PER CAPITA

15.2%
AT OR BELOW POVERTY LINE

74 years
LIFE EXPECTANCY

88% (rural)
ACCESS TO IMPROVED WATER SOURCE

91%
ACCESS TO IMPROVED SANITATION