The Strengthening the Role of Women Leaders in Promoting Peace and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka strategic initiative aims to empower local women leaders to advance the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. By supporting women leaders in politics and civil society organizations (CSOs) to forge relationships and build technical skills, the initiative aims to create a cohort of women leaders able to address the unique challenges faced by Sri Lankan women.
In Sri Lanka, women have limited political representation, which both reflects and fuels the social and economic barriers that women face. By increasing representation, this project can address women’s needs tied to post-conflict reconciliation, peacebuilding, and development. The project will take place in the districts of Kurunagala, Jaffna, and Ampara, with the help of three local partners: the Women Resource Center, the Affected Women Forum and the Jaffna Social Action Center.
The two-year initiative is funded by the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues and implemented by the Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) global consortium global to advance the status of women and girls worldwide, led by the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative in close partnership with the Center for International Private Enterprise, Grameen Foundation, and Search for Common Ground. Search for Common Ground is the lead implementing partner for this initiative.
Planned Activities:
- Carry out a rapid participatory needs assessment to understand better the needs and constraints of women leaders in project locations.
- Implement a Training of Trainers for women’s empowerment CSOs to enhance their knowledge and skills for engaging around WPS issues.
- Implement cascade trainings so that women political leaders can train CSO leaders to put their knowledge into practice, build trust with women political leaders across ethnic and religious divides, and enhance the reputations of women CSO leaders in seeking peace and reconciliation.
- Establish Women in Leadership and Learning (WILL) Clubs where women can discuss challenges to women’s participation in decision-making and identify how to take advantage of opportunities presented in WPS frameworks.
- Organize exchange visits so project participants can share experiences.
- Help women leaders to develop Collaborative Action Plans on WPS, identifying up to three priority issues and challenges related to reconciliation and violence against women and girls.
- Hold Local Dialogues to discuss the Collaborative Action Plans with the broader community.
- Implement a sub-granting mechanism for women’s empowerment organizations to implement their Collaborative Action Plans.
- Hold District-level Multi-Stakeholder Working Groups to connect the women leaders with male and female power-holders at the district level to elevate local issues identified through their action plans.
Sustainability: Through the learning clubs and exchange visits, women leaders will build foundational relationships and networks that can continue beyond the program. The network-building element of this program encourages women political leaders to view Civil Society Organizations as resource partners and vice versa. These relationships will help networked, grassroots approaches to succeed in the future. The curriculum and training material from the project will be available to local partners to use in the future. The small grants, local dialogues. and the multi-stakeholder dialogues—all open to the public—will highlight the value of women’s participation to the broader community, which can help to transform norms about women’s participation in the public sphere. The Collaborative Action Plans will be available to the women leaders beyond the life of the program.
