LIVELIHOOD SECTOR FUNDED BY CARITAS ITALIANA

   At the beginning of the new year the livelihood team was engaged in a process of re- 

   designing    the project proposals and the livelihood programme.

Most of the activities are still in place while few additions were made such as a capacity building component, literacy classes, social networking and creation of mother societies and village development committee.

Furthermore IGP activities have been strengthened by undertaking a market assessment in cooperation with SEDEC and by a solid documentation of the application procedure as well as the repayment procedure.

A training module on social networking was conducted for animators in the 3 sub offices

During the month of February the livelihood staff saw a major change as Merril’s collaboration with Sethsarana came to a halt. Kumari took over as the new livelihood officer in the SOA programme. To Merril goes our thanks for the wonderful job done during his period, and a big welcome back to Kumari. Activities were conducted as usual at the sub office level, the progress meetings were held regularly while we had to face some difficulties in the distribution of loans. A delegation from Caritas Italy visited to see the activities of the Livelihood programme. On 25th March members of Groups participated at the Lenten programme in coordination with the National peace programme. The livelihood resources contributed to the financing of this initiative.

Loans were not distributed in March due to various reasons but after the Sinhala-Tamil New Year holidays we will be able to make up for the missing distribution, by giving out 106 loans for February and March.

The livelihood team facilitated the visit of a delegation from the Don Gnocchi Foundation. They visited a Disability Centre in Kalamulla and participated in a meeting with our animators in Payagala Sub Office. The purpose of the visit was to conduct a feasibility study for a project for the Disabled to be done in collaboration with the Don Gnocchi Foundation, Caritas Italiana and SEDEC.

A process of collecting updated information and data regarding our groups has been initiated.The Livelihood team participated at the National Livelihood coordination meeting held in Galle from 14 to 16 March.

Other meetings were held at SEDEC regarding the implementation of the market assessment for Sethsarana areas.

Monthly progress meetings were held as usual.

The top priority of Sethsarana livelihood team is to enhance the quality of the implementation by the field officers (animators).

The quality of the work done depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of the animators. Attention will also be focused on the difficulties encountered by them and these will be addressed in order to bring about the desired results on the ground.

Therefore new tools and new capacity building training will be introduced.

Improve the quality of our work by market assessments, better procedures, social networking and village development committees will be our task this year.

The Head office team will consequentially increase the number of field visits in order to monitor the situation and get a better understanding of the ground situation.

Monitoring visits by the Head office team will constantly continue throughout the months

Group counting, improvement of the microfinance accounting and the implementation of the market assessment in cooperation with SEDEC are among the activities to be implemented in the next months Some logistic and organizational difficulties exist at the sub-office level especially at the lower levels of Management.

Our animators’ sense of responsibility needs to be improved especially now that their contract has been renewed.

Regarding the microfinance part we have to put a lot of effort in the documentation process as well as standardising the procedure.

Literacy classes appears to be a major need in the Diocese and we have planned to tackle this need by utilising the services of the Chief animators.