About 50 percent of the population in southern Sri Lanka lives below the poverty line compared to about 7 percent of the population nationally. About 60 percent lack basic services, including clean drinking water, sanitation, and access to credit and markets. Although various poverty reduction programs have been launched over the years, they have proven to be unsustainable, unsuitable for replication on a larger scale, or unable to reach the poorest and most vulnerable households.
In 2004, the Government of Sri Lanka launched a program known locally as Gemi Diriya, with the objective of empowering rural communities to improve their livelihoods and quality of life. The program built on a small, yet successful local pilot called the Village Self-help Learning Initiative that was created in 2000. Gemi Diriya is a 12-year program that is being implemented in three phases. Initial IDA support came in the form of the Community Development and Livelihood Improvement Project in 2004, and focused on three southern provinces. The project’s first phase worked to build self-governing community organizations with the capacity to manage sustainable investments by shifting decisionmaking power and resources to these organizations; strengthening local governments that were responsive to these communities; and working across the spectrum with federations of community organizations, the private sector, and NGOs to increase the size and diversity of livelihood options. This ground-up strategy adopted a community-driven development approach, characterized by direct resource transfer and participatory decisionmaking.
More than 180,000 households in 1,000 villages in the poorest districts of Sri Lanka benefited from community infrastructure and productive investments (drinking water, access roads and bridges, access to credit, markets, skills, and income generation). Of the 1 million people reached, many have moved from a dependence on subsistence agriculture and wage labor to new livelihood opportunities.
Highlights:
- Community infrastructure and services improved. Delivery mechanisms are now more cost-effective since investments of equal or better quality than traditional programs have cost an average of 30-40 percent less.
- Access to credit made available. Before the project, about 70 percent of households in the project villages had no access to credit and marketing facilities. Now, about 20,000 self-organized savings and production groups have been set up and are actively mobilizing savings. About 147,000 households have benefited from the savings and credit fund. Savings groups have used their cumulative savings of US$5.25 million to leverage credit equal to about 10 times that amount, and have invested US$17.6 million in 125 types of income-generating activities. They have also attracted funding and technical assistance from 15 major private sector agencies.
- Investments spread through cooperation. Investments in local infrastructure have enabled partnerships between communities and the private sector, better market linkages, and access to basic services. For example, in the village of Madumasgulla, the construction of a bridge allowed safe crossing of a stream that in turn provided access to school and increased trade and also increased land value. In the village of Pitakanda, the construction of a village access road allowed for a five-fold increase of trading vehicles entering the village.
- Program focused on youth. About 22,000 people, mostly youth, have benefited from skills development and employment placement activities. A piloted Accelerated Skills Acquisition Program in Badulla District resulted in the employment of 85 youth in 42 Cargill retail outlets in Colombo in early 2009.
- Progress networked through technology. Information and communication technology linked villagers to each other, the government, and the market. The Information Technology SHED (ITSHED) Program, which won the Manthan Award South Asia 2008 for ”best e-content for development” in the e-enterprise and livelihood category, was piloted in about 30 villages and is now scaling up to over 1,000 villages; 400 youth were trained to strengthen and maintain centers.
- The poorest received grants. Villages identified 11,888 people as destitute and therefore eligible for a one-time grant for the poorest of the poor. Over 9,900 (85 percent) people have received these grants and started income-generating activities. Of that number, almost 4,600 (about 50 percent) are now accessing loans from village savings and credit organizations to expand their livelihoods assets.
Total project cost for the first phase of Gemi Diriya was US$69.8 million, of which IDA contributed US$51 million. The Government of Sri Lanka contributed US$11 million. As an indication of local commitment, communities are contributing about 30 percent of the capital cost of infrastructure investments. The second phase will launch in 2010 with a total project cost of US$105 million, of which IDA will contribute US$75 million. The Government of Sri Lanka will contribute US$18 million; and communities, US$12 million. IDA has introduced a new approach, which led the Government to revise its own policies, shifting from a welfare-oriented to an empowerment-oriented approach to poverty reduction. Evidence suggests that this approach improves cost-effectiveness and efficiency of services like physical and social infrastructure and microfinance; and also significantly improves local governance and accountability. IDA support has been key in disseminating these lessons among key policymakers and local officials. As a result, this approach is now being scaled up nationally through government programs
The Gemi Diriya team has regularly shared information and experiences with donors — including JICA, GTZ, European Commission, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) — who are now adopting the project's approach. In fact, IFAD is financing the Dry Zone Livelihood Support and Partnership Program (DZLiSP), which uses approaches developed under Gemi Diriya, with the World Bank managing the supervision of the project.
The challenge for the program now is to scale up and link Gemi Diriya to the national program, Gama Neguma, without sacrificing quality. The second phase of the adaptable program loan began in 2009. Its aim is to expand into two new provinces and broaden achievements by better linking community institutions to local governments and addressing accessibility and connectivity constraints that hamper sustainable livelihoods; strengthening the value chains of key economic sectors by aggregating producers into federations to facilitate better market and financial sector linkages; improving the delivery of livelihood support services; improving technology; and building capacity of existing local level agencies to implement the national programs using the community driven development (CDD) approach.
RSS