Social Mobilization
Almost all the community support institutes in Sri Lanka believe that community mobilization is a facilitative instrument that enables positive changes which could help meet the challenges of societies in transition through changed attitudes, values, and behaviors of individuals or groups. Accordingly, individuals or groups are able for better weighing up their needs, to prioritize, to increase potentials of resources and also to produce results. WDF premeditates that the said changes can bring forth required structural changes within communities, with reliable conversion that supports lasting change.
When the self sustenance is concerned many institutions need to struggle in plentiful ways to establish self-driven mechanisms yet, if community mobilization process is not evolved at the inception it would be not possible to change the attitudes of participants in the latter, for a self driven operation. Mobilization becomes the most constructive tool in promoting less advantaged segments of respective communities. Basically, to raise awareness on persisting challenges and to prepare the community to go against them becomes the key component to be addressed in the mobilization process. A trained team of Asst. Coordinators have been positioned for this task, at present. Each Asst. Coordinator is paid monthly allowance. WDF has authorized 15% of it’s profit to manage these payments. Group guarantee becomes a basic requirement to be qualified for a loan. Administratively, 1,243 trained Assistant Coordinators are employed to facilitate group or society meetings, to resolve inter-personal misunderstandings, while assuring smooth operation of loan activities etc., and in addition there are 36 senior staffs appointed to oversee the accuracy of the said operation. The overall responsibility is being held by a Snr. Manageress assisted by an Asst. Manageress. There are 12 fundamental ethics in use in the process of Mobilization |
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The Mobilization unit of WDF is responsible for implementation of mobilization along with the above principles. Evidently, the impact of mobilization based action series has contributed in whatever way to minimize poverty from 32.4% in 1990/91 to 6.9 % in 2001. Similarly the life expectancy too, has increased up to 82 years . |