National fisheries solidarity movement as a partner of active citizenship
for development network (ACDN) organized a provincials convention to get
peoples’ proposal for the national budget at Sun Shine Hotel in Trincomalee on
26 of June 2012. A network has been formed consisting of four organizations
such as Uva Community Development Center (UCDC) Baddula , Low and Society Trust
(LST) Colombo, Center for Society and Religion (CSR) Colombo and National
Fisheries Solidarity Movement (NAFSO) Negombo.
All four organizations are working with different communities in
different districts on active citizenship for development network in the
country. This right based project is called Participatory Budget Monitoring
program. The main goal of this project is to increase engagement of communities
in decision-making process about development budget at local level, provincial
level and national level, in order to ensure their socio- economic rights.
This project is mainly based on 16 local governments in nine districts such
as Colombo, Kalutara, Badulla, Kegalle, Monaragala, Ampara, Jaffna, Trincomalee
and Mannar districts in the country. National Fisheries Solidarity Movement as
a partner of active citizenship for development network has responsibility to
implement this project in the North and East covering Jaffna, Mannar, Ampara
and Trincomalee districts. We have developed citizen forums indentifying 25
community leaders in four districts. Citizen forum is the major component of
this program.
The North and East provincials’ joint convention was organized by National
Fisheries Solidarity Movement to provide an opportunity especially for the
North and East peoples to submit their proposals for the national budget
because the budget proposals are called from peoples, CBOs and other sectors by
the government to prepare the national budget of 2013. ACDN is trying to submit
proposals, which were collected from the peoples organizing provincial
conventions to the national budget. Members of citizen forums in Jaffna,
Mannar, Ampara and Trincomalee districts’ peoples participated to the
convention. They were the key players of the convention because they intervened
to build their proposals representing the North and East people. Other
representatives of network partners LST, CSR and UCDC took part to succeed the
program. Some members of local government, government officials, CBOs leaders
and other organizations representatives involved this.
This was organized as a workshop. There were more than 130 participants for
the convention. We used this convention not only get budget proposals but also
to aware the peoples. We organized awareness programs in the morning session on
many issues. OfERR organization (Ceylon) shared their experience on Non-state
actors in development project as like mined organization. Participations were
educated on different issues such as citizen rights and role, social
justification and national budget. Network partners shared their experience on
this project in different level.
