Health crisis support and systems strengthening

UNDP has been supporting the Ministry of Health (MOH) by undertaking emergency international procurement of PPE on the request of the Government of Sri Lanka. UNDP has also been providing PPE kits and other preventative gear such as gloves, masks, sanitizers etc to key Government institutions and bodies such as the Disaster Management Centre, the National Police Commission, the Local Government Authorities across four provinces of the country, in an effort to keep frontline workers safe from the spread of the virus.

UNDP has also been working with the Health Promotion Bureau (HPB) to raise awareness on COVID-19 prevention and symptoms through the development of 9 short Public Service Announcements featured on national television and on social media, reaching over 6 million viewers in the country.

With Sri Lanka currently facing the monsoon season, there is now a high risk of COVID-19 particularly within communities who have been forced to evacuate and set up camp in shelters due to flashfloods and landslides. In this context, UNDP has been working with key organizations such as the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) and the Sri Lanka Red Cross, to ensure COVID-19 health measures are in place within these safety camps. UNDP also worked collaboratively with the DMC and the HPB to develop and disseminate sign-language safety precaution videos particularly targeted at persons with disabilities to ensure everyone has access to information at this crucial time.

Social protection – uprooting inequalities

UNDP is supporting the Government in socio-economic recovery efforts through the following:

In an immediate lockdown environment, UNDP co-convened a high-level roundtable with the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office and UNICEF to conduct a dialogue on Sri Lanka’s socio-economic recovery in a new normal context.  

Recognizing the important of the tourism sector for Sri Lanka’s recovery post COVID-19, UNDP has also been working with the Ministry of Tourism and Aviation, and the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority on a range of initiatives namely the facilitation for the development of a National Roadmap on Tourism for the country. To facilitate this, leveraging UNDP’s role as an integrator and convener, UNDP is working to bring together development partners to develop a single multi-donor framework to ensure efforts towards rebuilding tourism are cohesive, systematic and sustainable.

To support the immediate needs of the people during the lockdown environment, the Government provided cash transfers. However, efforts to reach all those deserving in a curfew environment proved difficult resulting in a few families missing on out receiving this relief package. Lockdown measures also had an unprecedented impact on the functioning of justice systems. The suspension of court operations negatively impacted the provision of timely and fair hearings, contributed to increased case backlogs, and led to increased duration of judicial and administrative proceedings. UNDP, though its work with the Legal Aid Commission, ensured that the Government’s COVID-19 cash transfer programme be extended to women unable to access court ordered maintenance due to the suspension of court operations.

COVID-19 also highlighted in Sri Lanka and the world over, a rise in the number of cases of Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) were seen happening behind closed doors. With a clear increase in the number of calls made to the emergency helplines for women and child abuse, UNDP also stepped into enhance the capacities of women organizations to be able to better respond to the needs of women facing abuse and violence in their homes during lockdown. UNDP is currently running a campaign to highlight the issue of domestic violence in the home through an advocacy campaign on television, radio and social media.

Green Resilient Economy 

1. With the COVID19 spread and its elevation to a pandemic status, conventional supply chains and markets were fully destructed. Sudden lockdown created havoc in business and had a great impact on small and medium scale enterprises. Since many of the family businesses in rural areas have been established as small-scale business entities, the lockdown resulted in a sudden decline in their income. This situation led to disrupting the income generation of smallholder farmers, making them economically vulnerable.

Panic-buying was a common feature and long queues were seen in front of supermarkets. People started to stock essential items and there was an unnecessary fear on shortage of rice in the country even though the country had enough stocks of rice until next harvesting season. The main reasons behind panic-buying and stocking of essential items were due to disruption experienced in the conventional supply chain. This was the scenario across all layers; locally and nationally.

As an option to overcome this issue, UNDP promoted local Agri- businesses through the local level government agencies; Provincial Agriculture Departments, Department of Agrarian Development and public and private seed producers. Though the accessibility was denied due to lockdown, UNDP was able to quickly mobilize resources through its local level partners and promote mid-season cultivation ensuring no disruption in the agri-production. UNDP is now promoting buy-back guarantees with the larger market players, local level marketplaces (farmer markets) and eco-tourism.

As the agricultural production is primarily dependent on the availability of water, which requires the farmers to receive weather advisories on time in order to address the climate risks and ensure climate change adaptation measures in agriculture. Hence, weather information-based decision making was piloted during the COVID19 lockdown. The seasonal weather forecast was issued by the Department of Meteorology and agriculture advisories were formulated by the Natural Resources Management Centre of the Department of Agriculture. These agriculture advisories were disseminated to Provincial Agriculture Departments ensuring the weather information based agricultural extension services were provided to the farmers ensuring no decline in production and income generation of the smallholder farmers representing the Rural sector of Sri Lanka. UNDP is now promoting this across the Dry zone of the country to reach more farmers.  

2. Building on UNDP’s extensive climate and sustainable development portfolio and partnerships with other UN and development agencies, public and private sector entities, academia and civil society groups, UNDP Sri Lanka is supporting the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to update and upgrade the country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) targets. Partnering with the Climate Change Secretariat (CCS) under the Ministry of Environment and Wildlife Resources; the country’s first NDC revision is expected to strengthen the readiness of GoSL and its people for climate change ownership. The revision will be carried out for climate change mitigation, as well as adaptation, with a clear focus on known and predicted climate risks, development benefits, and policy integration. The process will also support GoSL to incorporate some of green recovery strategies as a key consideration towards building a climate resilient nation.   

3. Tourism sector contributes to more than 11% to the GDP of the country (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2019). More than 500,000 individuals are employed in this sector. With the COVID19 pandemic, domestic and international tourism sectors were severely affected and according to the industry estimate Sri Lanka is expected to experience a negative growth of 70-80% in 2020 and approximately 40-50% in 2021 compared to 2018 income levels. This will have a profound impact on the Tourism industry in the country for at least another 3 to 4 years.

UNDP supported the Ministry of Tourism and Aviation and the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority Rapid Impact Assessment which led to development of a Roadmap for Resilient and Safer Tourism industry in Sri Lanka. In the Rapid Assessment it was revealed that Sri Lanka has no reliable value chain analysis conducted for different tourist attraction destinations and there are no proper carrying capacity studies available for major tourist attractions. This has led to inconveniences for the visitors, destruction of natural eco systems, loss of revenue to the destination managers as the ticket prices do not reflect the real demand for the destination. Further, the value chains are not fine-tuned and additional investments for rehabilitation of the destinations due to over visitation of tourists without appropriate damage mitigation measures.

Therefore, the GoSL has proposed to introduce a Sustainable Destination Management Certification scheme in collaboration with the Provincial Councils. Once the certification system is in place, all tourist destinations could be graded according to their facilities and services provided sustainably. UNDP Sri Lanka will support the introduction of Certification Programme through its BIOFIN project.

Its proposed to support 9 Provincial Councils (PC) to prioritize 18 destinations and conduct carrying capacity studies and value chain analysis through the UNDP Gen 2.0 support. The destinations to be prioritized under this project will serve minimum of 25,000 informal and formal sector employees. Total time period envisaged for these actions is 30 months and it will require a budget of 800,000 USD.

Digital transformation and innovation for speed and scale

Citra Social Innovation Lab – a joint initiative between UNDP and the Government of Sri Lanka – is partnering with the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) to design, develop and implement a national digital transformation agenda in the country in the next 5 years. This engagement will encompass assisting ICTA in the design, development and implementation of the national digital entrepreneurship agenda as well as the national digital governance strategy, and realigning and strengthening ICTA’s institutional capacity itself to lead these transformation strategies in the country.

Through this partnership, UNDP and Citra intends to incorporate a global perspective, bringing in technical input facilitated from within the team, as well as overall input and technical expertise from individuals and teams within Citra’s regional and global network. The Citra team will also focus on incorporating global case studies and best practices into these national strategies to further strengthen the interventions identified. Further, UNDP through the Citra team intends to focus on bringing a social innovation angle to all proposed initiatives, and ensure all interventions aimed at technology diffusion are facilitated to the rural areas of the country to reach individuals in marginalized and vulnerable pockets of society. Moreover, as the strategies will have a multi-pronged, whole-of-society approach when working towards the objective of national digital transformation, UNDP looks forward to working with partners across the board to ensure the optimal implementation of these interventions and to nurture a digitally equipped society for Sri Lanka.