LocationsA YCLI initiative
Social harmony and peaceful coexistence, learning from Akurana
July 25, 2023
Authored by Fahim Aslam (Project Data Associate, UNDP)
Entrepreneurship is a skill that is nurtured through exposure to new experiences and perspectives. Developing new projects and building business plans can be streamlined through networking and forging valuable relationships. Keeping these factors in mind, UNDP in Sri Lanka together with UNV, WHO and the National Youth Services Council (NYSC) initiated the YCLI Programme in 2021.
The Youth Community Leadership Programme (YCLI) focuses on supporting the youth of Sri Lanka in a variety of ways with emphasis on nurturing leadership, and entrepreneurship. As a part of this intervention, select youth groups were provided with an opportunity to develop a project in their respective province to promote youth engagement and participation.
As a part of this overarching programme, a group of young people from the Southern Province in Sri Lanka were chosen to participate in a knowledge sharing session in Akurana. UNDP partnered with Sarvodaya and Sevalanka with the express objective of facilitating an open discourse between participants on how to sustain business interventions while concurrently creating a platform where they could share ideas and differing perspectives on the importance of social harmony and peaceful coexistence.
The groundwork for this intervention was set up by an initiative carried out by UNDP in 2020/21 with Sarvodaya to support young entrepreneurs in Akurana. This EU funded regional PVE project sought to create synergies and ensure sustainability among projects. With its success, it seemed necessary to expand and exchange ideas at a further regional level under the youth component of the YCLI project.
With the objective of helping participants to better understand the process of developing sustainable business interventions, 3 entrepreneurs from the EU-PVE project joined the workshop to share their experiences. They gave specific focus to how they developed their own business plans and how they ensured that the needs of their community were addressed in the process.
The discussions were engaging and many of the participants were eager to ask questions and share their own perspectives and insights.
Building on this engaging and interactive discourse, the participants were able to seamlessly segway into discussing social harmony and peaceful coexistence. The participants were provided a detailed overview of the peaceful coexistence between the people of various religious and ethnic background in Akurana. Stepping into lead the conversation Ven. Sarada Thero shared his experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the Sinhalese and Muslim communities came together to support each other during the crisis.
This is highlighted through the COVID-19 stories book that was launched by Sarvodaya back in 2021: )
Taking the floor from the Venerable Thero, Hakeem: a youth change maker from Akurana shared his personal experience of working with the Buddhist monk and how they have been collectively making progress as a community. He further elaborated on how, in despite of the pandemic, flooding, hate speech and violence, as a community they have been able to stand together.
Hakeem is now in the final semester of his undergraduate degree in social sciences and is currently working with a local NGO. He shared very personal insights on how working with different religious communities had changed his life and perspectives. In a powerful statement, Hakeem told the crowd that he wishes to work for his community and share knowledge with his fellow youth community members.
At the close of the workshop religious leaders representing the Buddhist, Muslim and Tamil communities asked the youth to be more involved in decision making and promote dialogue within such groups to promote social cohesion and harmony.
Sarvodaya will continue this exchange programme by supporting other communities in the Kandy district.
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