WFP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific - 2016 SPRs RBB 2016 SPRs by country | Page 786

Standard Project Report 2016
In Sri Lanka, women’s participation in the labour market is 35 percent compared with 76.4 percent for men.
Thirty-three percent of women work in the agricultural sector compared with 27 percent of men, which also means
that women are more severely affected by climate shocks. In the Northern and Eastern Provinces, where women
are particularly disadvantaged, it is difficult for them to find a job and when they find one, they are paid half of their
male counterparts' wages. In Northern and Uva provinces, 55 percent of households headed by women are
food-insecure compared with 39 percent of households headed by men.
During the resilience-building activities WFP and its partners used this contextual experience and consulted with
communities to design activities around women’s roles, ensuring equal opportunities for men and women without
adding to the burden on women. Both men and women were equally represented in the process of identifying and
accessing resilience-building activities, taking into consideration gender-differentiated needs. The proportion of
women and men who participated in the activities were representative to the gender ratio in the operation and
addressed the gender inequalities in access to employment and control of productive assets.
As part of communal administration of the school meals programme, women continued to hold more than half of the
leadership positions in the school meal programme management committees to ensure accountability.
WFP continued to work with the United Nations gender and gender-based violence task force, sharing experiences
and learning from experts such as UN Women in order to contribute to UNDAF pillar 3 by promoting gender equality
in all its activities. While mainstreaming gender, WFP has also moved towards a more strategic approach by
preparing a country office Gender Action Plan (GAP) in 2016. WFP trusts that the execution of the GAP in 2017 will
build a stronger and systematic platform to address gender issues.
While WFP will continue to advocate for greater parity, there are also cultural factors beyond WFP's control,
especially in regions such as Eastern and Northern provinces. There are some insightful post-distribution findings
on intra-household decision-making among the households that received resilience-building entitlements indicating
that in households receiving cash transfer assistance, women equally take the decisions on how that cash is
utilised. The post-distribution monitoring also showed that households headed by women spent the cash on
purchasing a wide variety of food items that were not part of the food basket WFP provided.
Training on gender was provided to all WFP staff, and during the ten days of activism to end gender violence,
information materials were shared within the country office as well as with all the government counterparts. Overall,
303 of the 675 government staff who received WFP training were women.
Protection and Accountability to Affected Populations
WFP continued to strive to mainstream protection across operations and avoid exposing beneficiaries to further
harm. This was done through sensitisation and capacity development of government, and WFP staff and joint field
missions with government to review proper integration of safety and dignity concerns at food distribution sites. It
was further done through the provision of clear recommendations for corrective action and adjustments.
WFP did not encounter significant political or logistical constraints in Sri Lanka and maintained strong relationships
with the Government. WFP contributed to humanitarian protection by designing and carrying out food assistance
activities in a manner that does not compromise protection for those it serves, but rather, contributes to their safety,
dignity and integrity.
A participatory community-based approach was used to select the most vulnerable communities and households
while preference was given to households headed by women, widows and widowers, single family households as
well as households with disabled or elder persons. WFP anticipated the risk of possible double registration of
households. Therefore, as part of its mitigating measure, WFP worked with government authorities to ensure that
meticulous verification and registration of beneficiaries were undertaken in an organised and coordinated manner.
WFP facilitated community meetings to inform beneficiaries of their entitlements and where to lodge a complaint or
seek more information. WFP also provided a significant amount of information in the form of posters and banners
displayed at various locations providing beneficiaries important messages on their entitlements and rights. These
efforts resulted in the high proportion of assisted people receiving information about WFP assistance and their
entitlement.
WFP considered protection concerns, such as distance, physical barriers and insecurity when selecting project
sites. Together with the government partners, WFP selected the resilience-building sites in such a way that would
ensure the most convenience for the beneficiaries and minimise the security risks for them when travelling to and
from the project sites.
Other measures were also taken into consideration such as waiting time and crowd control to make sure that cash
entitlements exchange and food distributions took place safely and did not negatively affect vulnerable individuals
Sri Lanka, Democratic Socialist Republic of (LK)
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