Community meeting in Vaharai, Batticaloa starts the tsunami relief process

Sewalanka was established as a development NGO with a clear mandate: to address the needs of the most vulnerable communities in the most neglected and disadvantaged regions of Sri Lanka .

Historically, civil society organisations have formed in response to conditions in a given environment. When Sewalanka was founded in 1993, conflict was raging in the North and East of the country. The communities caught in the middle of this war were clearly among the most vulnerable and disadvantaged. Although Sewalanka was founded as a development organisation, it entered into the North and East as a relief agency, providing humanitarian assistance to meet the immediate day-to-day needs of conflict affected communities. As conditions in the North and East have changed over the years, Sewalanka have shifted to strategies that will address the long term needs of these communities. Many of our programs in the region are now focused on strengthening civil society organisations in order to contribute to the stability and future development of the region.

Over the past ten years, Sewalanka has become nationally and internationally recognised for its work in the field of development. We have developed a strategy that takes communities from the relief aid of a conflict situation to a long term program of sustainable development, we have created a decentralised organisational structure covering the majority of the most disadvantaged areas of the country and we have built up a team of professionals men and women, Sinhala and Tamil, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian responsible for everything from the conceptualisation of projects to village level implementation.

Sewalanka Foundation is incorporated under the Companies Act No. 17 of the Legislative Enactment of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. It is also registered under the NGO Registration Act, Registration Number L16806.

The mission of Sewalanka is to enhance the capacity of rural communities to democratically identify and address their own development needs and to provide services that contribute to the economically viable, socially just and ecologically sustainable development of Sri Lanka.