Reached
4,000 People
1000 Families

Model:

• Emergencies

Helping 1,000 families across 12 districts rebuild informal livelihoods after Cyclone Ditwah, reaching those whose unregistered businesses leave them outside government recovery systems.

Nirmala’s Story

Nirmala is forty-two and lives at the edge of her village in Puttalam with her two children. For the last six years she has run a small home-based food business: cooking rice packets in the early morning that her eldest son sells at the bus stand, and supplying snacks to the village school canteen. It is not a registered business. It is, simply, the income that fed her family. When Cyclone Ditwah hit, the rain came through the roof of her kitchen and ruined every kilo of stock she had saved up to invest. The school closed. The bus stand emptied. For nearly two months Nirmala had no income at all. When government officers came through the village to register losses for compensation, she was told she could not be included. She had no business registration, no tax record, no formal documentation of what she had built brick by brick over six years.

The Wider Picture

Across the twelve districts where Palmera is delivering this fund, the same pattern repeats. The poorest households almost always run unregistered businesses, not by choice, but because formal registration in Sri Lanka requires paperwork, fees, and repeated trips to government offices that are out of reach for someone running a one-person business out of a kitchen, a roadside cart, or a small fishing boat. Without registration, these households are invisible to the systems that protect everyone else when disaster hits. Not in the lists. Not in the data. Not in the queue when relief is allocated.

The Sri Lankan government did recognise this. As part of the Cyclone Ditwah recovery package, it committed 25,000 LKR per unregistered business to help these households restart. The political commitment was real. But as of May 2026, the families and the regions where we work have not received it. Not because anyone changed their mind, but because at the administrative level, how to collect the data, verify the businesses, and distribute the funds was never clarified. The mechanism never landed. And so, once again, the people the policy was meant to reach are the ones who lost out.

This is the gap the Cyclone Livelihoods Rebuilding Fund exists to close.

What Your Gift Does

• $100 restarts one family. A tailored package, validated face to face, sized to the business they were running before the cyclone.
• $500 restarts five families. Plus the mentoring and village banking links that keep income from collapsing at the first shock.
• $1,000 restarts ten families and helps move them, for the first time, into the system that should have caught them this time.

What We Are Going To Do

We are walking 1,000 families across 12 districts back to a working livelihood. These are families who lost their stock, tools, seed, stalls, boats, working capital, in the days the cyclone moved through. The months since have been quietly grinding: borrowing, skipping meals, watching small businesses they built over years quietly stall.

• A tailored livelihood restart package for each family.

  Not a flat hand-out. For some it is rebuilding stock for a home-based food business. For others, replacing a fishing net, repairing a damaged sewing machine, restocking a small shop, or buying back the goats and chickens that were lost.

• Working capital and mentoring alongside the asset.

  Delivered through our village-based staff and the women’s collectives we already work with, so the asset does not sit idle and the income does not collapse at the first shock.

• A first step toward formal registration, where it makes sense.

  Not as a hoop to jump through, but as long-term protection. The next time disaster hits, these families will be in the system rather than outside it.

How We Will Do It So It Is Long-Lasting

Recovery is not a transaction. We do not arrive, hand over an asset, and leave.

• Participatory from the start.

  We work with the local civil society actors who already know these families: women’s village banks, farmer groups, community committees, and the partner organisations who stood with us through the emergency response.

• Validated family by family.

  Every restart package is checked face to face by staff who live in or near these villages. We sit in each household, understand the business that was running, understand what was lost, and agree what that family specifically needs to start earning again.

• Lifting families into the system.

  The reason these households missed the 25,000 LKR was not lack of political will. They were not in the system, so when the system tried to help, it could not see them. We walk willing families through business registration, into the government livelihood schemes they should already have been part of, and into village banking groups.

• Feeding the lessons back.

  Through our coordination with Disaster Management Units and local authorities, we share what we are learning about why the administrative path did not reach these households this time, so that next time it does.

By the time our direct involvement ends, these families will be visible to the systems around them. The next disaster, the next scheme, the next opportunity, will find them already inside.

From Survival to Self-Reliance

The storm has passed. The headlines have moved on. But for 1,000 families across 12 districts, the hardest part is still in front of them.

Stand with 1,000 families. Help survival turn into self-reliance.