Sri Lanka country strategic plan (2023–2027)

CSP approved at EB November 2022 session

Revision 01 approved by the RD in July 2023.

Sri Lanka is a lower-middle-income country currently experiencing an economic crisis that threatens to erode decades of development gains, including in poverty reduction, and considerable progress made towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Despite its impressive human development indicators, increased focus is needed to address food insecurity and malnutrition, increase women’s labour force participation and reduce inequality.

Since 2020 Sri Lanka has faced several waves of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, which has had a multidimensional impact on public health, the economy and human and social rights. A decade-long build-up of fiscal and current account deficits and rising external debt combined with pre-coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic tax cuts have pushed Sri Lanka into a crisis of liquidity and insolvency, leading to high inflation, rising commodity prices, power outages and shortages of fuel and other essential goods and services.

The country strategic plan for 2023–2027 seeks to provide protective food assistance and other support as required in the short term and to restore and improve food security and nutrition by developing in-country capacity and reducing vulnerability through an integrated resilience and nutrition-sensitive approach that layers and sequences programming. The plan embodies the humanitarian–development–peace nexus by enabling the Government to establish stronger systems that reduce the impact of shocks while fostering gender equality, increasing the population’s ability to recover and ensuring lasting peace. The country strategic plan seeks to address immediate and medium to long term needs through a systems approach to capacity strengthening. Leveraging its comparative advantages in Sri Lanka, WFP will deliver four outcomes:

➢ Outcome 1: Vulnerable communities in Sri Lanka meet their food, nutrition and other essential needs during and after crises.

➢ Outcome 2: By 2027, targeted groups in Sri Lanka have improved nutrition from strengthened nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific programmes focusing on, in particular, the first 8,000 days of life.

➢ Outcome 3: By 2027, communities in Sri Lanka have strengthened resilience and reduced vulnerability to natural hazards, climate change and other risks with improved sustainability of livelihoods.

➢ Outcome 4: By 2027, national and subnational institutions and stakeholders in Sri Lanka have enhanced capacity to enable adaptive and resilient food systems to improve food security and nutrition.

The country strategic plan, developed in consultation with the Government and other stakeholders, is strategically aligned with the national policy framework, the United Nations sustainable development cooperation framework for 2023–2027 for Sri Lanka and the WFP strategic plan for 2022–2025. It is informed by contextual, gender and gap analyses, especially the 2021 United Nations common country analysis.