Plan Sri Lanka: what we do

Plan’s work in Sri Lanka covers 5 key areas, all of which are rooted in the rights of the child:

• healthy start in life
• quality education
• protective environments for children
• household economic security for children’s well-being
• child-centered disaster risk management

Plan Sri Lanka works to improve the nutrition and development of children aged under 5 years old. Our target groups include adolescents (primarily girls), women of reproductive age, pregnant women and other caregivers.

We use health promotion, which provides spaces for community members and empowers them to own and participate fully in initiatives to improve their health, as the basis of all our interventions.

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Plan Sri Lanka

Plan has been working in Sri Lanka since 1981, on the invitation of the national government. We work with nearly 20,000 sponsored children and around 125,000 marginalized children in close to 270 rural communities across 7 districts.

Plan’s programmes are carried out through 4 Programme Units (PUs): the North Central PU in the rural, drought-affected, agrarian districts of Anuradhapura; the Central PU comprising Kandy, Matale and Nuwara Eliya; the Uva PU comprising the districts of Moneragala and Ampara in the Eastern Province; and the newly started Eastern Programme Office in Batticaloa district.

We work in partnership with local and national governments and civil society organisations to sustain improvements in children’s lives.

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Plan International Supports Healthy Minds and Bodies for Mothers and Children in Sri Lanka

Plan International is fighting malnutrition and supporting health and well-being in Sri Lanka.

 

Mothers in Sri Lanka who said they were worried about child malnutrition are learning new ways to improve their lives and health, as well as those of their children.

Plan is working with the Foundation for Health Promotion and Rajarata University to train local health officials on how to best work with villagers to create an environment where they feel comfortable raising concerns and coming up with their own solutions.

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Seven ways Plan is improving children's access to health around the world

Empowering girls to understand the risks of early pregnancy in Zambia

Operating health centres in Indonesia

Building toilets in Timor Leste

Empowering women to educate other mothers about the importance of health in Sri Lanka

Reducing the rate of mother and child deaths in Cambodia

Every child deserves the right to health. 
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Feeding young bodies and minds

Kudagama, in Sri Lanka's Anaradhapura District, is a village of straw-roofed huts and bare-brick homes. The villagers who live here are from one of Sri Lanka's lower castes and they have faced poverty and discrimination for generations, with harmful consequences for their health.

But now the area has been chosen by Plan as part of a new programme to improve the well-being of mothers and children. When the project started, nearly half of all the younger children in the village were malnourished. Today, that figure is around 35% and falling.

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Healthy Living for Mothers and Children in Sri Lanka

Healthy living for mothers and children in Sri Lanka Kudagama, in Sri Lanka's Anaradhapura District, is a village of straw-roofed huts and bare-brick homes. The villagers who live here are from one of Sri Lanka's lower castes and they have faced poverty and discrimination for generations, with harmful consequences for their health. 

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Plan Provides Educational Toolkits to Pre-School Teachers in Sri Lanka

Hemawathie Manike, a pre-school teacher with 13 years of teaching experience, might be forgiven for thinking that she’s seen everything when it comes to Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD). Manike earned her diploma in ECCD at a teacher training center in Sri Lanka’s western Kurunegala district and promptly created the Dimuthu Early Childhood Development Center.

In the beginning, she worked with the most minimal facilities and had only one assistant. Now she registers between 35 and 45 children at her ECCD Center each year. She accepts that her formal training lacks the techniques that are necessary in identifying the different stages of child development, or delayed development in children.

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Improving Maternal and Child Health in Sri Lanka

Over the past year, Plan has been working with local residents and government health officials in villages across Sri Lanka on a new Health Promotion Strategy to make simple lifestyle changes in order improve maternal and child health.

Plan’s goal is to lower the under-five child malnutrition rates, which can often be as high as fifty-percent. The program also seeks to improve early childhood development.

 

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A Quiet Child Learns to Speak in Sri Lanka

When Nilusha’s daughter was 2 years old, she could only speak a few words –and Nilusha blamed herself. Her family believed that baby Kavisha could not talk because they had neglected some of their traditional rituals.

“We couldn’t observe her first meal of rice and her first haircut, according to our traditions," says Nulisha, who lives in the village of Veherayaya, in southern Sri Lanka. "I was feeling guilty as well. Things between me and my husband got bitter. He was angry and often shouted at me.”

But family traditions were not the cause of Kavisha’s learning problems, which are common in Veherayaya. A recent study has shown that 24 out of the 80 village children - 30 percent - had growth and development problems.

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Collective feeding makes children healthier in Sri Lanka

An estimated 7,600,000 children under the age of 5 die every year, more than 70% of them in Africa and Southeast Asia. About 2/3 of these deaths are caused by preventable diseases, while more than 1/3 of all child deaths are linked to malnutrition.

For 75 years, Plan has been working in remote, impoverished parts of the world to teach parents better practices to keep their children healthy, happy and alive.

In Kudugama village of Sri Lanka’s North Central province, 47% of children under the age of 5 were underweight. Because villagers were from a lower caste, they received lower quality health services than neighboring villages and dared not complain to officials to improve the situation.

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