Since the end of the armed conflict in 2009, the number of Sri Lankan refugee returnees from India has been considerably increased. OfERR Ceylon has been working and helping the returnees in re-establish their lives in their homeland after return. They majorly support in getting civil and legal documentation for citizenship, education, livelihood, shelter, women empowerment, capacity building, job opportunities and many other essential areas. Since 2009, a total of 31,039 Sri Lankan refuges have been returned from India so far.

The return of refugees also entails a variety of challenges including reception, assistance, housing, livelihood, psycho-social care, and integration into the health and education system. Successful reintegration is based on economic, political and social factors. Economically OfERR Ceylon is helping returnees to re-establish their lives by providing livelihood assistance and strengthening reintegration support through establishing linkages and counseling.

Welcome groups are formed in order to provide linkage services, networking aid and guide to receive reintegration support for civil and essential documentation. In addition, SHGs were formed especially for women returnees to support for their self employment and to increase their household economy.

Education is regarded as one of the most important needs as part of the reintegration needs. Understanding that good education can lit hope in the lives of resettled families, OfERR (Ceylon) gave maximum importance in reintegrating the children back in schools upon return. This is due to the reason that assistance in accessing the Sri Lankan school system, vocational skills training, and other education related services in Sri Lanka will result in more sustainable livelihoods and employment opportunities.

In this line, OfERR (Ceylon) provided assistance for the returnee children with securing enrolment in schools and ensuring better reintegration in the schools in Sri Lanka, providing support with stationery, uniform, shoe-socks to the most vulnerable children, providing support with catch up classes (including language classes) for children below 18, conducting career guidance and counselling sessions for graduates/diploma holders, providing counselling support to motivate and monitor school education & support for reintegration in schools through recruitment of animators/counsellors in the regional offices, support payment to graduates to obtain equivalent certificates for the Indian qualifications, providing travel costs associated with obtaining 10^th and 12^th standard equivalent certificates and linking the experienced/skilled returnee students with appropriate non-formal education or National Vocational Qualification certificate programs.

There were 201 children assisted with the support for their education, of them 154 children are from returnee families, whereas 47 children are from host communities, the latter category of beneficiaries were chosen on the basis of the extreme vulnerability.

The uncertainties caused by the ethnic war in 1983 made disruptions in the normalcy of Sri Lankan Tamils and forced them to experience frequent displacement in and outside the country. The frequent displacements had not only created uncertainties, but also made many to lose their documentation evidences such as birth, marriage and death certificates and paved ways to raise questions over the future of their generations. At the same time, their protracted refugee situation made them being unconscious of the documentation. OfERR (Ceylon) works in coordination with OfERR to provide support with the essential documentation of refugees in India and refugee/IDP returnees in Sri Lanka. Since the arrival in Tamil Nadu, nearly 24,000 children had born to the parents of the Sri Lankan Tamils living in the camps. Of them, the majority have not registered their birth at the consular office of Sri Lanka in Chennai and therefore, face the risk of being classified as stateless. The reason for their inability to register for the consular birth is that they either lost their documents or unregistered their births, marriages and deaths.

The returnees face enormous difficulties with the absence of their essential documents in hand. Especially, majority couldn’t go further with the absence of citizenship as it is important for returnee registration, resettlement, education and employment purposes. In order to prepare the returnees with essential documents, OfERR (Ceylon) trained the staff on civil documentation and having linkages with civil papers officials at divisional (ADR), district (DR), Provincial (ARG) and National level (RG) in order to access supports from the authorities.

Understanding the needs of essential documents among the refugee returnees, OfERR (Ceylon) has also been consistently advocating with the concerned authorities to simplify the procedures and requirements. Hence, there is less insistence of mandatory documents by the officials and help the refugees to receive documents with the submission of minimal supportive documents. In essential documentation, OfERR (Ceylon) has been recognized as a nodal agency to supplement the governmental civil and essential documentation support to the people. Overall, OfERR (Ceylon) has assisted 738 beneficiaries to receive essential documentation in the reporting period.

Whatever the documentation assistance provided, the complex bureaucratic document requirements and the long processing of citizenship has been a challenge for the refugee returnees to obtain their citizenship. The citizenship long processing basically puts an applicant’s life on hold for up to 12 months as the National Identity Card is not issued before the citizenship is granted. The graduates who need the equivalent SL certificate for Poly-technical courses also have to wait for several months. OfERR continues to make these slow bureaucratic procedures easier and faster through advocacy with the Relevant Ministries.

OfERR (Ceylon) regards capacity building as essential for human and community development in the post-conflict scenario and works with the ideology that every human being is the same in God’s creation, but they turn out to be different when they start to recognize their hidden potentials.

In order to materialize this belief, OfERR organizes capacity building trainings and awareness programs to develop the capacities of the IDPs and refugee returnees.  By building refugee capacities and promoting their vocational and income generation activities, OfERR (Ceylon) aims to create a sustainable community with enriched knowledge, skill and attitude.

Some of the capacity building programs held among the target groups including refugee returnees and IDP returnees are:

1. Training on Community based protection/vulnerability reduction;

2. Training on Sexual and Gender Based Violence Protection;

3. Training on Child Protection;

4. Training on Child Care, Health & Hygiene;

5. Participatory Rural Appraisal exposure training;

6. Entrepreneurship Development Programme;

7. Specialized livelihood trainings;

8. Advanced training on Essential documentation;

9. Training on peace building and community cohesion;

OfERR Ceylon is conducting the training activities among the communities as it is believed that education is a key for community development. OfERR (Ceylon) also facilitates capacity building sessions concerning civil documentation, disaster risk management, gender-based violence and child abuse, child protection measures, civil rights and access to legal services, good governance and functions of local governments. These activities are planned and implemented in cooperation with community-based organizations (CBOs), self-help groups and other local actors. OfERR Ceylon also provides training sessions which are aimed at providing and upgrading livelihood skills such as business & marketing, mechanical maintenance, home gardening, herbal plant cultivation, chili powder production and small business development.

OfERR (Ceylon) field staff, who were trained on advanced protection training, have engaged in conducting protection trainings in the district and village level, based on the needs identified. In the training, the participants were brainstormed about the usage of community protection tools such as problem identification, problem prioritization, power walk, stakeholder analysis, protection egg analysis, etc. There were overall 69 trainings conducted with the participation of 563 men and 853 women comprising of IDP and Refugee Returnees.

Many returned refugees struggle to secure adequate housing. Homes and property may have been destroyed or damaged during the war and land title documents may have been lost, and in some areas the military has still not release the land and they forcibly occupied for ‘high-security zones’ back to former residents. Returned refugees must also stay for a minimum of six months at one location to apply for National Identity Cards (NIC), essential civil documents to secure employment, education or other services in Sri Lanka. To complete the six-month requirement until they get a housing assistance, OfERR’s temporary shelter programme has been set up. The objective is to assist the vulnerable refugee returnees with the transitional shelter upon return, to restart their lives in a positive way in their native villages. For the shelter assistance programme, the vulnerability of the returnees were assessed with the participation of village level government officials and CBOs.

Upon finalizing the beneficiary for support, the materials were provided for the owner-driven construction of temporary shelters. Overall, there were 500 + beneficiaries of refugee returnee community assisted with the provision of temporary shelter in the northern and eastern provinces.

In the context of a post-war rehabilitation, strengthening the livelihood and employment opportunities in the resettlement areas is very vital. With the contextual changes, the refugee returnees and the displaced communities were beginning to resettle in their native villages. At this situation, with the understanding that right to livelihood is an imperative to a returned or a resettled refugee or an IDP family, OfERR (Ceylon) has given maximum emphasis to the sustainable livelihood programme. The other reason is that the sustainable livelihoods, while giving the individual a regular income, will also contribute for the local economic development. In this effort, the livelihood sector was considered as one of the primary areas of recovery and among the resettled households, livelihood has been considered as one of the most important needs that to be immediately catered. Thus, OfERR’s intervention aims at providing support for sector-based livelihood assistance for returned/resettled communities who engaged and willingness to engage in agriculture, fisheries and livestock related sectors and enterprise development support, especially for youth through inputs, equipment and accessories with required skills.

As a result of the livelihood support, the families were asserted their right to earn with the provision of livelihood, after reintegration in their native places where there is a lacking of livelihood and employment opportunities. With this, they were capacitated to engage in sustainable livelihood measures to accomplish day today livelihood needs of the families. From the monitoring of livelihood beneficiaries that were undertaken with the external experts it was learnt that from the needs assessment to the point of evaluation there was a continuous connectivity with the beneficiaries; and the success rate of over 90 per cent among the monitored beneficiaries was quite evident from the field visits. Particularly, among the returnees, the livelihoods restored their sense of hope and dignity and made them be self-reliant to cope up with the economic challenges that are experienced in the preliminary period of reintegration.

The health programme intends to influence a greater understanding of child care needs and requirements, and improve individual and family health and hygiene practices, while also intending to promote psycho-social wellbeing among the target groups. In the awareness programmes, topics such as child protection, child abuse and child rights were taught. The Regional Director of Health Services (DHS) and Medical Officer of Health are some of the key government officials who facilitated these training programs with the support of OfERR (Ceylon) field staff. OfERR (Ceylon) staff, who were experienced in child-friendly programmes, have also played a major role as facilitators in conducting the child care, health and hygienic sessions. In these sessions, the children were sensitized on child rights, personal hygiene and hand washing techniques. They were taught about six steps of hand-washing and encouraged to practice it at home in order to lead a healthy and hygienic life. During the course of the trainings, awareness materials carrying the visuals of good health and hygienic practices have been demonstrated in order to provide practical examples of good hygiene.

In order to promote hygienic standards in the schools, there were trainings and awareness sessions conducted. In these training, 218 children including 105 boys and 113 girls have participated and benefited with the information on hygienic aspects and participants gained basic awareness and knowledge about managing the menstrual hygiene in a positive way.