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Keynote address under the title "Outstanding Political Commitment to Colombo's Poor" delivered by Susil Siriwardena, Partnership Promotion Advisor to the Mayor of Colombo, at the One Day Awareness Workshop on "Mid Term Milestones Towards a Caring Municipality in Colombo" - a review organized by the Colombo Municipal Council, which was held at the BMICH on June 24.

A careful reading of today's programme will indicate that this is no conventional workshop or seminar. In that case what is the difference? What is unusual about this gathering? Really three things. First, the huge diversity of participants both at the special invitee level and the invitee levels.

Second, the variety of subject matter that is being discussed in the meeting. And third, the highly open and dialogic nature of the discussion - a practice unusual for government in these crisis-charged days.

What is the scope and purpose of this workshop? The overall subject of focus is the urban poor or the city's poor communities. In the perspective of SAPNA, one of the organizations I am attached to, we call it the third Sector in society, besides the conventional private and public sectors. Viewed in this light, they are much more than merely being the poor urban communities.

Against this overall focus, there are three clear purposes - which also define the scope - of this workshop. First, is to share and build awareness on particular programmatic innovations and initiatives. Second is to share and build awareness about a "caring" municipality. Third, is the practice of transparency and accountability by a public sector institution, the CMC, before an open gathering of Colombo's concerned civil society.

In understanding the context in which the workshop is being held, we should note the timing. It is two years since the current Council was elected to office and since His Worship Prasanna Gunawardena assumed the Mayoralty.

Hence the use of one of the words in the workshop's title, namely "mid-term". Second there is another very important reason. That is that just over two months ago, a new government came into office and as many as three Ministers directly and closely related to Colombo's urban municipal governance are participating as Chief Guests. Additionally, there is a spectrum of distinguished civil society and private sector individuals also participating as special invitees.

Innovations

Next I would like to talk about the content of the workshop. You will agree that this is the most important part of the day's proceedings. In other words, the innovations in terms of new programme initiatives. It's easier if I list them one by one because there are about eight of them.

1. Perhaps the most important single innovation is the passing by the Council of the Poverty Reduction Strategy for Colombo. This is no simple exercise. Never have we had before such a comprehensive strategy like this.

The Council has had programmes like the Urban Basic Services Programme done in collaboration with UNICEF, and the national level Urban Housing Sub Programmes of the Million and One Point Five Million Houses Programmes, both of which were national, but never has it taken the bold initiative to develop its own independent Urban Poverty Reduction Strategy. Hence this marks a major milestone in the Council's thinking and action in this pivotal area of policy action.

2. The Partnership Promotion Programme, popularly called the PPP. Started in 2002 through a Council resolution, it evolved to maturity through 2003 and you have available to you its Annual Report for 2003. Under the PPP, for two consecutive years, the Council voted Rs. 25 million for projects focused on women and children and implemented through partnerships involving the CMC and the poor communities on one side and NGOs or any other civil society organization on the other.

3. The Healthy City of Colombo Programme which is a wide-ranging programme done in collaboration with WHO and many other civil society and public sector partners like schools and hospitals, covering a gamut of activity areas including environment, preventive health, health education, schoolchildren, women and children.

4. The Process of Participatory Budgeting and City Consultations. This innovation was started this year and we have a special session devoted to it at the workshop, with the ratepayers and householders of District Four actually participating and expressing their ideas.

The idea is to begin a complex new process of involving the active views of city dwellers in the process of preparing the Council's budget. This is an ambitious process and marks the beginning of a new transition.

5. The Electronic Governance Programme is where the Mayor is on round the clock contact and communication with both citizens and Council staff on day-to-day operational matters. This is now ongoing and almost daily widening its outreach. The strategy is yielding immediate results and there is an all-around appreciation of its value and productivity. The net result is an improvement in operational efficiency and a saving in costs.

6. The Council now has linkages with an array of foreign donors among whom are UNDP, UN habitat, WHO, GTZ of Germany and DIFID of UK, This is an index of confidence in the Council by our international friends and collaborators.

7. In the field of Municipal Services, which is one of the fundamental functions of the whole Municipality, there have been major new initiatives and provisions of funding for projects which had previously been postponed for a long time. Some of these have in fact been done under innovative practices like Community Contracts, reaping economies in costs with value added in quality.

8. Land tenure for the Urban Poor. This is a major breakthrough in national urban policy. It was hanging fire for a long time since the hiatus of the earlier Million Houses based urban housing programmes. Not only is freehold tenure being actually transferred to them but there is now a new policy being elaborated to give assessment numbers to low income settlers.

Leadership and connectivity

This demonstration of good faith is no simple or light matter. It is the outcome of nothing less than a very serious ethical and political commitment to the urban poor and those living in undeserved settlements. This is the spirit and attitude of a "caring" municipality that is begin inculcated.

This amounts to a clear demonstration of leadership and confidence in serving the people of a city transcending the rancour of divisive party politics which is one of the structural evils bedeviling our polity. Today's workshop is not mere publicity but a sharing of ideas and familiarization with the pro-poor work being done in one's city. Such leadership produces a rare consensus of political will which cuts across party and hierarchical divides to produce a collective will to action.

Institutional memory requires us to point out the connectivity with the eighties, when the urban, rural and plantation poor became the center and mainspring of national housing and settlement development throughout the entire base of the country.

Those national and countrywide programmes were historic for their inclusivity, genuine targeting of the poor, the preeminent deciding and doing role of the poor in devising their own housing solutions, the state's role of offering sensitive support to the primary actors, administrative decentralisation and devolution to the household level and a huge investment and dividend in continuous learning and unlearning from the people themselves. In fact, we are reminded today of the earlier precedents of today's sessions which were then called Performance Reviews with the Minister himself present.

The venue was the BMICH as is the case today.

Let me conclude by saying that there is a great deal of change yet to be done. There is no room for complacency. Changing and transforming an institution is a challenging task. Many mindsets and procedures of the old thinking are yet in place.

But what we have seen is the restarting of a process of deep -going change which we must make irreversible this time round. And this is happening because all these innovations have been legalized by the force of Council resolutions. I hope this mid-term review will inspire us to take the next and key steps in this long process.

But there is new hope for the poor and all of concerned civil society living in the city of Colombo.

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