On May 14, 2020, comdu.it successfully concluded its COVID-19 Relief Fund for Tamils in Sri Lanka, having raised a total of $102,322.90 in less than six weeks that helped provide temporary poverty relief to 8,525 families. It was the largest humanitarian relief campaign that we ever undertook, and has been recognized as a significant effort within the Canadian and German diaspora.
Working with a large network of local non-governmental organisations, charities, and independent activists, we focused on especially vulnerable families.Of these, 8,150 families were from the districts of Ampara, Badulla, Batticaloa, Colombo, Jaffna, Kandy, Kegalle, Kilinochchi, Kurunegala, Mannar, Matara, Monaragala, Mullaitivu, Nuwara Eliya, Puttalam, Trincomalee, and Vavuniya. These families included that of daily wage earners, plantation workers, seasonal laborers, tradespeople, IDP returnees, ex-combatants, families of the disappeared, war widows, commercial sex workers, female-headed households, LGBT, persons with disabilities, children’s and special needs homes in the Eastern Province, and others. We also assisted an additional 375 Sri Lankan Tamil refugee families living in the Mandapam Camp in the district of Ramanathapuram in Tamil Nadu, India.
Given the generosity of donors especially amidst the current global economic uncertainty, we also took the unprecedented step of openly publishing our fund snapshot to demonstrate our commitment to transparency and accountability: https://tinyurl.com/yaytgxhn.
The focus will now shift to collecting reports and documents in support of the relief provided over the past few weeks so that we can evaluate aid impact.
Thank you again to our donors for their extraordinary support in this tremendous hour of need in our homeland.