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Sri Lanka’s impressive progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals continues to be undermined by persistent violent conflict in some parts of the country. The abrogation of the peace process which was the basis for the United Nations Country Team in Sri Lanka to allocate 50% of the UNDAF to promoting an improved environment for a sustainable peace anchored in social justice and reconciliation.
In this challenging environment the UN Country Team is still committed to delivering on the outputs agreed with the Government of Sri Lanka through the UNDAF:
- interventions to improve socio-economic opportunities and services for conflict-affected communities, particularly IDPs;
- interventions to increase the participation of civil society and people in the peace process; and
- interventions to improve the capacity of public institutions to promote peace, human rights, and national consensus.
Various UN agencies continue to advance peaceful coexistence, social cohesion and reconciliation through a range of relief, recovery, and development activities. They have also taken steps to improve the conflict sensitivity of their services. |
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When the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) was being developed in 2007 donors and heads of agencies requested the planning team to plan beyond the “no-war-no peace” scenario on which they proposed to base the Framework to place more emphasis on delivering on peace and its related governance dimension. In addition all UN agencies have included conflict sensitivity and social cohesion programming either directly or indirectly, to advance peaceful coexistence, social cohesion, and national consensus building.
The World Health Organization is implementing its health as a bridge to violence prevention programme; UNDP-Transition Recovery Programme and Mine Action Project deliver integrated package for recovery and social cohesion; UNHCR through its Confidence Building and Stabilization Measures (CBSM) continues to protect returning refugees and ensure their sustainable reintegration; UNICEF remains unwavering in the protection of children from forced conscription, abduction, and trafficking; and the International Office on Migration (IOM) and UN-Habitat pay direct attention to conflict transformation and rebuilding of war-affected communities. Other agencies including UNESCO, UNFPA, FAO, ILO, and WFP are expanding socio-economic opportunities for conflict affected communities.
The Way Forward - Desired outcomes
To achieve the aim of joint planning and programming the UN Country Team constitutes a Peace Thematic Group which promotes joint projects and monitoring of peace related projects. In addition there are other sub working groups within the Peace Pillar. These include the Mine Action Group, Protection Working Group, Early Recovery Working Group, and the Conflict Sensitive Working Group. Each group is responsible for the monitoring of the attainment of related outputs in the UNDAF. In the coming months UNDP will recruit and deploy social cohesion officers throughout the conflict affected communities. They will collaborate with other UN agencies and community based organizations to advance social dialogue, inter-community bridging and consensus-building. The UN approach is based on the assumption that while political conflict settlement may be top-down durable peace is bottom-up. |
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