About us

HDO's Vision

A just, peaceful, and resilient society where every individual—especially women, youth, and persons with disabilities—can live with dignity, equality, and opportunity.

HDO's Mission

To empower vulnerable communities in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka through a rights-based and participatory approach that integrates gender equality, sustainable livelihoods, environmental protection, health, and human rights—fostering peace, resilience, and long-term wellbeing.

Objectives

To ensure equitable opportunities for women, girls, persons with disabilities and LGBTQI+ persons, fostering their participation in society while enhancing income, reducing poverty, improving their quality of life, gender equality and preventing SGBV

To promote sustainable land rehabilitation, coastal conservation, and environmental protection, enhancing biodiversity and ensuring the resilience of coastal ecosystems.

To improve healthcare access and educational facilities by building a medical ward that provides quality care for patients, while promoting WASH facilities, and addressing menstrual poverty in schools for a healthier community.

To empower youth, civil society organizations, community leaders and field level government ofticials in advocating for and defending human rights, civil and political rights, fostering a sense of responsibility and leadership among young people in promoting justice, equality, and respect for all.

Our Journey and Activities

HDO Sri Lanka is a Local NGO is carrying out Rehabilitation/ Development programs at Northern Province in Sri Lanka from February 2016. HDO is registered with the NGO Secretariat at the National Level – Voluntary Social Services, Ministry of Coexistence Dialogue and Official Languages in Sri Lanka (Reg: No: L – 163104) HDO has implemented its projects in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka having defined its purpose of existence as:

Engage with resettled women’s communities to strengthen their asset recovery process
Facilitate and interface with governance structures to ensure space for women to raise their voices through appropriate line agencies.
Involve women in resettlement planning by identifying their concerns and resolve them within the scope of the resources available.

HDO and its constituent communities are working with the challenges of post-conflict development efforts in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka having to deal with complex externalities.

The operational area has been and will be the northern districts of Sri Lanka, with the aim to rebuild livelihood assets with the assistance of the government and participation of local communities. Within this framework HDO has the following as its key principles of engagement:

Increased self-reliance and reduced dependency: mobilization and organizational strengthening.
Improved participation of women and girls: decision making and education and employment sectors.
Improved access to vocational and technical skills leading livelihood assets building: creating self-employment and enterprises development though skilled development training.
Building marketable skills, with national qualifications to mainstream collaboration with the private sector: linking micro industries.
Improved access to government services and schemes: solving land rights, accessing subsidies and grants for resettlers.

Increased organizational empowerment and improve the participation in advocacy forums
Public and private sector collaboration: building partnerships.
Improved access to resources, services and supplies
Ensuring the protection of citizens’ rights: building local capacities to improve governance.
Identify and address cross-cutting issues: gender, child rights, SGBV etc.
Prevention of alcohol, tobacco and drug use: children, youth and adults forums.

HDO’s goal is to improve skills to youths and women for their long term sustainability. Improving skills to an individual, will improve their generation to be a best life. Our most of the programme was particularly successful in mobilizing women and youth in the project areas with the aim of discovering Livelihoods. Moreover, we see a lot of young girls who attended our training sessions had managed to access employment within the newly established private sector agencies in the area.

In overall, HDO in this pursuit made efforts to contribute towards the Sustainable Development Goals which recognized the key ingredients of development to access education by children; improved access to employment for women, particularly in sectors outside agriculture.