North and East provincials joint convention to get peoples’ proposals for the national budget

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.