Sri Lanka and NP: long term impact on beneficiaries

Perhaps most important, NPs work with local groups has helped lay the foundation for lasting civil society improvements that will endure long after we complete our project. Working closely with other local peace and human rights groups, NP has contributed to achieving outcomes at the following three levels:

Beneficiaries / vulnerable civilians:

• Increased feeling of security in communities enabling people stay rather than flee the violence as they have in the past;

• Negotiated the release of their children abducted as child soldiers;

• Improved the protection of internally displaced people who now risk the return to their village;

• Increased the number of complaints filed with police, something not done in the past in these regions because people feared reprisals; and

• Organized youth-led community safety surveillance groups.

Civil Society:

• Increased protection of human rights activists thus increasing reporting/monitoring;

• Improved civil society functioning by accompanying activists, lawyers and politicians who have been receiving death threats;

• Increased the accountability of Sri Lankan institutions who are responsible for human rights and (civil) violence prevention; and

• Encouraged Sri Lankan civil society groups (human and civil rights groups, humanitarian groups) to continue or even increase the scope of their work (for example sending monitoring missions to incidents).

International and national groups:

• UNHCR, UNICEF and others are seeking NP partnership, collaboration and implementing-assistance for a majority of their community level activities, with offers to fund for the same;

• The Sri Lankan IDP Working Group, Child Protection Working Group, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, and the Weekly Operational Meeting of the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies have invited NP to participate in forums; and

• The Human Rights Council in Geneva and the Winnipeg child protection agency have invited NP to their annual meetings.

Evidence of NP’s impact in Sri Lanka, its pilot deployment, includes:

• Decreased actual and potential violence among the specific people with which NP works.

• Decreased violence and the prevention of violence in the communities in which NP works.

• Civilians feel safe when accompanied by an NP peacekeeper.

• Civilians and communities are doing without NP what they initially asked NP to assist them with.

• Civilian involvement in peace activities is growing.

• Peacekeepers have built and sustained relationships at community, regional and national levels.

• New or stronger resources, networks and methods for solving conflicts non-violently are emerging in the communities and regions where NP works.

• Increased safety in the communities where NP works.

• NP is maintaining neutrality and essential relationships with all parties to the conflicts.

• NP peacekeepers are responding creatively, flexibly and strategically to changing conditions and learning from the work.

• NP’s long-term engagement successfully involves from smaller to larger numbers of people impacted and from fewer to more communities impacted over time.