Helping them help their community

Training the youth to be able to help themselves and their communities is a project which can never go to waste. There is much that can be gained for the youth involved and in the long run, for the future, as well. Therefore, with the objective of training youth who are already involved in community service, in the reporting procedures of donor agencies a Financial Management Workshop, was organised by the Sri Lanka Youth Parliament (SLYP) for selected action partners of the SLYP.

The programme was held at Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies in May and was attended by 23 selected youths from various parts of the country.

Day One of the programme was divided into resource mobilization methods, identifying and meeting with resource providers, writing a funding proposal as well as reports and accounting records.

The first part consisted of Timelines/Budgeted and Actuals, Include Project Budget/Creating a Budget/Guidelines, Cash Flow/Statements/Fund Management, Balance Sheet/Allocation of costs, Measuring the returns – how effective the fund utilization and Donor Reporting and Analysis.

The second part consisted of: Which records should you keep, The accounting process: cash or accruals, Accounting for projects and donor funds, Accounting Documents maintaining – invoicing, receipts and Accounting for core costs. Day Two of the programme was divided into two parts as well, which were, Financial Monitoring and Internal Control Systems.

The former covered the following: Financial information – who needs what, when and why, using financial statements, using budget monitoring reports and Overview of donor reporting. Finally, the latter consisted of How to safeguard your assets, The role of audit, Setting authorization limits/Signatories, Implementing Procedures for approval/ payments.

The workshop was organised through a grant given to the SLYP by OTI of USAID. The resource persons for this programme were Verni Vijayarajah, a freelance trainer and S. A. D. L. Weerasinghe CEO, Irritech Pvt Ltd.

The SLYP is a project of the Youth Empowerment Division of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies and it is a youth-led youth-run initiative with a broad network of youth.

Those who participated in the programme were asked to give their feedback on it and these were what some of them had to say regarding the knowledge they gained from the workshop and how they plan to use the knowledge they gained.

One participant stated, "When I formulate my action plan I, faced many difficulties on financial management, but through this workshop I learnt how to manage financial work."

"I learnt to make a creative project," said another participant and went on to say that the knowledge gained would be shared with the "community, it helps me to promote my knowledge in financial management at the maximum level. The whole part of the lecture was great especially record keeping and cash flow segments," said one other participant adding, "I have an idea to mostly use what I learnt in my own life and my community."