Strategy
Plan Sri Lanka’s Country Strategic Plan works to address the key issues affecting children in Sri Lanka.
Children face daily challenges including social exclusion due to poverty or social class, inadequate child protection systems, insufficient food supplies and poor opportunities to establish a livelihood that meets their basic needs.
Many children in Sri Lanka are deprived of primary health care services and safe water, and are unaware of the good hygiene practices that prevent widespread diseases.
The excessive consumption of alcohol by a high percentage of male adults in some communities puts children at risk of domestic violence, and children and women suffer from malnutrition and anaemia.
Key goals
To tackle these issues, Plan Sri Lanka has set the following goals:
Children’s health
- Introduce and establish behaviour change communication.
- Provide assistance to establish community health volunteer systems.
Children’s participation and protection
- Support initiatives with the intervention of the state and the media.
- Support skills development, while strengthening participation and partnerships.
Ensuring safe water and environmental sanitation
- Implement and scale up community managed projects in schools and communities.
- Integrated water resource management.
Establishing household economic security
- Support initiatives that provide sustainable financial services to the poor, in particular women.
- Ensure economic re-integration especially in war-affected areas.
Children’s education
- Influence the creation of provincial policy and a regulatory framework.
- Address the poor quality of basic education in primary schools.
Our progress
Plan Sri Lanka has worked with communities to achieve significant improvements.
Some of our most successful work includes:
- helping to increase children’s participation in the school governance and school development planning process.
- increasing the number of families in Plan communities with access to safe drinking water from 14% to 30%, those with sanitation coverage from 76% to 89%, and good hygienic behaviour from 1% to 16%.
- supporting children’s educational needs by assisting families with school enrolment, school fees, books and other necessary materials.
- working with residents of the Hantana Tea Estate in the Central Province to provide life skills and mental health training for young people, as well as organising an educational street drama.
- ensuring that children are protected by mobilising 86 communities with the technical knowledge and attitudes to keep them safe, and linking them to protection committees at the divisional level.
