TSUNAMI UPDATE
SRI LANKA
Women's Bank
Government inaction and a slide back into war take their toll on the country’s tsunami rehabilitation work
Credit to help people rebuild their lives remains this network’s first disaster rehabilition tool
Sadly, the tsunami has been replaced as the main story in Sri Lanka by the country’s return to war. In the Tamil majority areas along the country’s northern and eastern coasts, where some of the most devastating effects of the tsunami were felt, hundreds of people have been killed, shops have been burned, and suicide bombs have exploded in recent months. Spasms of violence and destruction punctuate daily life in these areas, which are sliding back into the full-scale conflict which lasted for two decades and claimed 65,000 Sri Lankan lives. Neither side is adhering to the peace agreement signed last February and negotiations have broken down.
In the mean time, huge amounts of aid money for tsunami reconstruction are lying unused in government coffers, while tens of thousands of people continue to languish in tents and temporary housing around the country, most of them reluctant to defy government prohibitions and move back to their coastal land, unlike their counterparts in Indonesia and Thailand. Despite this extremely difficult situation, the two large women’s federations are carrying on with their energetic and large-scale tsunami rehabilitation work around the country.
The Women’s Bank (WB), a national network of women’s grassroots savings groups, has been undergoing a huge expansion of its women-run savings and credit groups in tsunami-hit areas over the past 18 months. WB is now operating in nine tsunami-hit districts, mostly along Sri Lanka’s southern and eastern coasts. In these districts, Women’s Bank has expanded already-established savings groups and started new ones, to provide a people-controlled mechanism for extending badly-needed credit to tsunami survivors, for all their immediate needs. To enable people to qualify for loans from WB’s national funds (and from the ACHR joint tsunami fund), the rules for membership, loan-taking and repayment have all been relaxed and loan request procedures accelerated, while teams of experienced women savings group leaders have been moving all over the country to assist these new groups in managing their loans and repayments.
The main focus of this rapid expansion of lending in tsunami-hit areas has been to help people start earning again. But in addition to loans for income generating activities, WB is also giving loans to purchase alternative land, construct new houses or repair damaged ones, dig wells, lay water pipes, build toilets, pay school fees, cover health costs and repay high-interest informal debts. Many of these new areas are fishing villages, so loans are also being extended to buy, build or repair boats, and to purchase fishing equipment. Here is a brief update on WB’s tsunami lending, as compiled by Sevanatha in May 2006, with some comments from some new borrowers.
