From Finland to Sri Lanka: Support After Cyclone Ditwah Reached Thousands
When Cyclone Ditwah triggered a nationwide emergency in Sri Lanka last November, KIOS moved quickly to channel extra funding to three trusted local grantees. Through our grantees, help could reach people living in remote areas and those often left outside mainstream relief. Here’s what was achieved, and why locally rooted response mattered.
A Climate Disaster with a Human Cost
Cyclone Ditwah has been described by local reporting as one of the most severe natural disasters to hit Sri Lanka in recent decades, unfolding into a nationwide humanitarian emergency marked by loss of life, displacement, and large-scale damage to homes and infrastructure. In the wake of the cyclone and its cascading impacts, including floods and landslides, people across the country faced immediate needs: safe shelter, food, hygiene items, access to health services, and support to resume everyday life with dignity.
Official situation updates noted that more than 1.8 million people across 25 districts were affected at the height of the disaster, and later updates still recorded large numbers of families continuing to live with the consequences, including displacement and damaged housing.
Reported casualties were severe, and later situation updates cited hundreds of confirmed deaths and people still missing. Homes were washed away or made unsafe, and essential infrastructure like roads, transport links, electricity and water systems were disrupted, leaving some communities physically harder to reach just when they needed help the most.
Families living in poverty, daily wage earners, small farmers, and people whose housing was already precarious, often face the deepest setbacks and the slowest recovery. And for communities that experience discrimination or exclusion in everyday life existing barriers can hinder access to timely support during disasters like Ditwah.
Responding When it Matters: Why KIOS Took Action
KIOS learned about the rapidly worsening situation directly through our grantees and their community networks soon after the cyclone hit. Our grantees were already in contact with rural and minority communities, and they were hearing what people needed most in that moment.
At the same time, KIOS recognised a familiar challenge: funding intended for long-term human rights and development work is not automatically usable for immediate humanitarian relief. Yet the situation on the ground demanded urgent action. To make it possible for our local grantees to respond to the disaster, the KIOS programme team worked with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland to apply for flexible, rapid resilience funding that could be channelled quickly to where help was needed.
Alongside this, KIOS launched a small fundraising campaign that ran for two weeks in December. In that short period, supporters raised 600 euros. A modest sum in global terms, but a meaningful milestone for KIOS, as previous fundraising efforts had not reached similar results. What mattered most was the signal behind it: people responded quickly when they understood what communities in Sri Lanka were facing and wanted to help.
KIOS committed to sending these donated funds directly to our local grantees supporting affected communities, and the transfer was made alongside the Ministry-approved resilience fund before Christmas.
Three Grantees, Three Pathways to Recovery
While the cyclone affected the entire country, recovery did not look the same everywhere. Some places were cut off by damaged roads; others were coping with unsafe housing, lost livelihoods, or prolonged displacement. The extra funding from KIOS enabled three Sri Lankan grantees to respond where they were already trusted, and to reach groups and locations that can be missed when support is distributed only through centralised channels.
This is what that response looked like, from household essentials to psychosocial care, to strengthening preparedness for the next emergency.
Getting Essentials to Families: ESDF’s Targeted Distributions
The Eastern Social Development Foundation (ESDF), an organisation focused on women’s and human rights with long experience working with vulnerable women and minority populations in post-war Sri Lanka, carried out an early analysis of where government and humanitarian agencies had reached, and where critical gaps remained. Based on this, ESDF prioritised locations and groups with urgent unmet needs, including families directly affected by flooding and landslides and households facing layered vulnerabilities such as women-headed households, people with disabilities, and families living in poverty who had not received earlier assistance.
With the extra funding, ESDF prepared and distributed practical household support, clothing packs, hygiene items, kitchen utensils and other non-food essentials, reaching 420 affected families in disaster-hit areas. Their work focused on districts including Puttalam and Kandy, selected due to the significant impact of floods and landslides and the needs identified through coordination with local authorities.
Because some roads had been heavily damaged by landslides, ESDF used alternative routes and locally supported transport solutions to reach communities and deliver assistance as planned. Just as importantly, ESDF coordinated with divisional secretaries and development officers to verify field-level needs and avoid overlapping assistance, an approach that helped ensure limited resources went where they mattered most.
In the early recovery phase, these basics make a difference: hygiene items help prevent health risks in unstable living conditions, kitchen utensils restore a family’s ability to cook for themselves, and clothing provides dignity and immediate protection when households have lost belongings in floods.
Recovery with Dignity: TSA’s Emergency Relief and Psychosocial Care
The Social Architects (TSA), an organisation working on human rights, justice, accountability and inclusive community development, responded to urgent needs with a rights-based approach that combined material support with information, psychosocial care, and community agency.
In the most affected Hill Country communities, where many estate workers and their families live in overcrowded rooms and face longstanding structural barriers, TSA delivered assistance shaped by what families said they needed, rather than distributing identical packages to everyone. Their response included emergency food and non-food support for displaced households, as well as cash grants that allowed families to decide how to cover the most urgent costs, whether that meant food, medicine, rent or loan repayments.
57 families with shelter, 248 families with financial support, and 363 children with school supplies to help them continue learning after disruption. TSA also supported safe access to education by distributing school shoes to 150 students in a context where children were travelling long distances on damaged roads and temporary paths to attend classes.
But recovery is not only physical, it is emotional and social. TSA reached over 1,000 people through psychosocial support and awareness raising, using approaches designed to be accessible and culturally grounded. Street drama performances, followed by direct engagement with lawyers and counsellors, helped communities understand pathways to compensation, services and remedies, while addressing mental wellbeing in the aftermath of fear and uncertainty.
One community member described the impact with simple clarity: “TSA was the first to come to us, and they helped us a lot.”
Reaching People at the Margins: Équité’s Trainings and Essential Support
For LGBTIQ+ communities, disasters can intensify vulnerability, especially when discrimination affects access to mainstream relief, livelihoods, healthcare, and safe housing. KIOS grantee Équité, a community-based organisation working nationwide to protect the rights and wellbeing of LGBTIQ+ individuals, responded by pairing immediate material support with skills that strengthen community preparedness for future emergencies.
With the additional funding from KIOS, Équité delivered essential groceries to 200 affected LGBTIQ+ individuals across multiple districts, using their networks to reach people in Nuwara Eliya, Batticaloa, Jaffna, Ratnapura, Galle, Anuradhapura and Colombo. They also distributed a three-month supply of hormones to 60 transgender individuals, using a careful verification process to ensure safety and continuity of essential treatment that had been disrupted by the cyclone.
At the same time, Équité organised comprehensive first aid trainings with 53 participants, facilitated by the Sri Lanka Red Cross. The trainings included practical skills such as CPR, bandaging, wound care, and safe approaches to patients in crisis situations—equipping participants to support each other when official help is delayed or hard to access. As participants put it: “This increased our self-confidence and our ability to help each other in emergency situations. Your support is very valuable to us.”
Beyond the Numbers
Across the three grantee responses, the extra funding from KIOS translated into practical support delivered quickly and locally: 420 families received essential household items through ESDF; 57 families received shelter support and 248 families received cash assistance through TSA; 363 children received school supplies and 150 students received school shoes; over 1,000 people were reached through psychosocial support and rights awareness; and Équité supported 200 people with essential groceries, provided continuity of healthcare for 60 transgender people, and trained 53 participants in first aid skills.
What these numbers share is a clear message: when trusted local actors have flexible funding, they can respond to real needs fast, adapt to difficult access conditions, and include people who are too often missed. And this is key in making sure that human rights are respected in times of crisis.
Behind every number is a moment of regained stability: a household cooking again using replacement utensils; a child returning to school with the supplies they need; a family paying for medicine with a cash grant; a community laughing together at a healing event after months of fear; a participant performing CPR with confidence because they practiced it when it mattered.
A Note of Thanks
This response was made possible through development cooperation funds from Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland, enabling KIOS to provide flexible additional funding when it was most urgently needed. It was also strengthened by individuals who donated during the short December fundraising campaign by KIOS. This was proof that solidarity travels fast when people understand what’s at stake.
Cyclone Ditwah’s destruction will take time to fully repair. But the speed and reach of this response show what can happen when funding meets trust: local organisations already embedded in communities can act quickly, reach remote areas, prioritise those most affected, and help people recover not only materially, but with dignity.
More to read and watch:
Video: “From Loss to Recovery: Helping Families Rebuild After Cyclone Ditwah”