By Lionel Bopage –

Dear Mr Ramanah, Rotarians, and friends,

First, I want to disclose that I am not a Rotarian, but a Paul Harris Fellow. For several years, I have worked alongside Rotarians in Australia, particularly with Mr Haran Ramachandran, and with Rotarians in Sri Lanka on the practical business of getting help across to people who need assistance. So, I speak as a friend of Rotary rather than as a member.

Tonight, I want to discuss two specific dates.

The first is the twenty-eighth of November 2025. Cyclone Ditwah made landfall on the eastern coast that evening. By the second of December, it had gone. In those four days, it produced the worst flooding and landslides Sri Lanka has seen in two decades. All twenty-five districts were affected. Around 2.2 million people were caught by the water and the landslides. That was close to one tenth of the population, including an estimated 522,000 children. The Disaster Management Centre recorded 646 deaths, and 173 people were still missing. At the peak, 233,000 people were sheltering in 990 safety centres. The World Bank put the direct physical damage at 4.1 billion US dollars. That was about four percent of the country’s gross domestic product, destroyed in roughly four days.

The second date is in November, this year.

I will discuss about that date later. The response to Ditwah was one of the most generous I have witnessed. However, that was not enough. The story is still unfolding.

Let us examine what made up that $4.1 billion, because its composition matters more than the total.

The largest single category was not buildings. It was agriculture: 814 million dollars. Paddy, vegetables, subsistence plots, maize, livestock, inland fishing, and the irrigation work that carry all of it. More than 58,000 hectares of paddy land were flooded in the eastern districts alone. Forty-six reservoirs reached critical spill levels or failed outright.

That is not simply damage to property. That is destruction of income — of the earning capacity of precisely the households that had no margin to begin with.

Schools, health facilities, small businesses, and factories along the rivers accounted for a further 562 million dollars. The Rapid Education Sector Assessment found 1,682 schools affected and more than 555,000 children unable to attend. Six hundred and twenty-two water supply schemes had been left non-functional. Some 113,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

Ditwah did not destroy luxury. It destroyed the specific machinery by which a poor family feeds itself, educates its children, stays healthy, and earns. And that distinction is the whole of my argument. If a disaster destroys possessions, you replace those lost possessions. If it destroys a household’s capacity to earn, no quantity of food parcels will restore it. Only rebuilding that capacity will.

Let me put on record what came from Australia, because much of it came from people in rooms very much like this one.

The Australian Government committed three and a half million dollars. It routed the money deliberately through delivery partners rather than treasuries — World Vision Australia and Save the Children, the World Food Programme, the UN Population Fund, and UNOPS. As a standing contributor to the Red Cross and the United Nations emergency funds, Australia had already helped release a further eight and a half million dollars. That happened before any bilateral pledge could even be drafted.

Alongside government, Australian civil society moved. UnitingWorld, the agency of the Uniting Church, opened an emergency appeal. Australian Rotary districts opened their own. And Rotary Australia World Community Service — RAWCS — did what it exists to do. With three staff and some two hundred and sixty volunteers, it moves nineteen million dollars a year. It supplies the mechanism that turns goodwill into the money transferred — audited accounting, compliance, and secure international transfers.

Sustainable Lanka, the collaboration between District 3220 in Colombo and District 9685 in New South Wales, raised over thirty thousand Australian dollars and moved it on that infrastructure. That is what generosity looks like when it is properly organised, and everyone who contributed should be proud of it.

The emergency phase is over. The United Nations closed its Humanitarian Priorities Plan on the eleventh of June, having reached 575,000 of the most vulnerable people through sixty-nine partner organisations. The state of emergency was lifted in July.

However, the recovery is not over. The Post-Disaster Needs Assessment put the cost of a resilient recovery at 3.4 billion dollars. That means restoring things, so they survive the next disaster that arrives. There is money for the first phase. On the thirteenth of August, the Presidential Task Force on Rebuilding Sri Lanka reported more than twenty-five billion rupees disbursed against more than fifty-five thousand damaged houses. We all understand that it is real progress.

Nevertheless, that meeting was convened to discuss delays. The week before it, the Disaster Management Division had written to District Secretaries with an uncomfortable figure. As of the thirty-first of July, only about thirty percent of the funds allocated for Ditwah recovery had been spent. Of the one billion rupees set aside for resettling displaced families, only eighteen percent had been used. Something like sixty billion rupees sat unspent, while so many families sat in temporary shelter.

The United Nations named one reason back in March. Households without formal land documentation face significant barriers in accessing full reconstruction grants. The families least likely to hold a clean deed are the same families being excluded from the money meant to rebuild their homes. They include Malaiyaha workers, informal traders, and people whose grandparents settled on half an acre of land but never registered it.

So: nine months on, tens of thousands of households in the hill country and the east are still living with unrepaired damage, on un-stabilised slopes, drawing from water schemes that have not been restored. That is the condition in which they will meet the second date.

On the 11^th of June this year, the United States Climate Prediction Center upgraded its alert from an El Niño Watch to an El Niño Advisory. On the 13^th of August, it reported a greater than ninety percent chance of a very strong event through the coming autumn and winter. It also put the probability of a historic event at sixty-nine percent for October to December. By historic, it meant one beyond anything in the record.

The International Research Institute at Columbia surveys twenty-six forecasting models. All twenty-six models agree of which fifteen forecast a Pacific anomaly beyond the highest intensity category the Institute defines. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US has said plainly that this may be the strongest El Niño since records began in 1950. An event of that magnitude could produce atmospheric effects never before observed. Our own Department of Meteorology puts the peak between October and December. It notes that, of some twenty-six El Niño events since 1950, only three have been classed as very strong.

Now, what El Niño means for Sri Lanka appears widely misunderstood. It matters that we get it right. It is not simply drought.

The relationship between El Niño and Sri Lankan rainfall has been studied across a hundred and thirty-nine years of records. It is seasonal, and it runs in opposite directions. El Niño makes October, November, and December wetter, and makes January to March and July to August drier. The north-east monsoon strengthens while the south-west monsoon weakens.

So here is the forecast Sri Lanka is carrying into the next twelve months. Heavier than usual Maha rains from late September through November, with flood conditions expected around November and the sharpest risk in the north and east. And then a significantly drier Yala — island-wide, with the already dry districts of Jaffna, Trincomalee, Batticaloa, Anuradhapura and Monaragala worst affected.

Flood, and then drought. This will be on top of Ditwah.

The most sobering thing I have to say tonight is that Cyclone Ditwah struck in a year without an El Niño. The destruction it caused was done unassisted.

To its credit, the government of Sri Lanka has not been idle.

The National Council for Disaster Management had met at the Presidential Secretariat at the end of June. The Maha season has been brought forward by about two weeks — water releases and fertiliser distribution will begin in early October — so that cultivation gets ahead of the November rain. Tanks inside wildlife reserves are being rehabilitated. Battery imports for solar storage are being accelerated. Water bowsers are deployed; search-and-rescue capacity is on standby. All twenty-five districts have been instructed on water management.

Nevertheless, note one thing that came out of that Council meeting. Officials themselves raised the need for a new legal framework prioritising prevention to replace the predominantly reactive approach of the Disaster Management Act of 2005.

That is the state describing what Loughborough University researchers published in February after studying Ditwah. Sri Lanka has under-invested in prevention and over-invested in recovery. It pays for the rebuilt bridge, not for the retaining wall that would have saved it. And it permits unplanned development in areas known to carry risk. That includes agricultural and residential development, plantations and houses on slopes mapped as unstable, and building on flood plains the old irrigation engineers would never have touched.

A ministry can deploy a bowser. But it cannot put a rainwater tank on every house in a village. It cannot teach every farmer to read a seasonal forecast. Nor can it make sure an elderly woman living alone at the end of a lane hears the warning at two in the morning.

That is not a criticism of the state, but a description of the existing gap. A gap in community capability.

Now let me bring the argument that I came to make.

There is a model Rotarians know well. It is the best available answer to that problem. It operates in Kampuchea, in Pursat province, and it is called Sustainable Cambodia. It is Rotarian-led and funded substantially by Rotary clubs around the world. It has one important founding rule not to be an aid organisation.

Staff do not arrive in a village with a list of projects. They help the families constitute a Village Development Committee. The families then decide for themselves what would help them most — a preschool, shallow wells, bio sand filters, alternative agriculture, fish farming, beekeeping, and so on. Then the families do the work. Resources, training, and education are provided. The labour, the choices, and the ownership stay in the village.

There is one condition. In return, those families need to commit to passing it on, to helping the next village do the same.

Consider what that produces. A well with a committee that owns it. A school built by the parents whose children attend it. A spreading obligation instead of a spreading dependency. One woman in Pursat has described what a shallow well changed for her family. The hours she once spent walking to distant ponds to collect water, became hours available for earning, and her children could attend school regularly.

That is not only charity making people comfortable. It is capability making them solvent.

A working group in Australia and Sri Lanka has already formed under the Sustainable Lanka initiative to explore pilots on exactly this model.

Let us be concrete.

The Department of Agriculture has issued advice for the coming season. In effect, it is an empowerment programme waiting for a delivery partner. It asks farmers to treat the heavy Maha rain not as a threat but as a deposit. They are being asked to bank it against the Yala drought that follows. Build small ponds in cultivation areas. Bury coconut husks in the soil to hold moisture. Draw less water from reservoirs, so that more carries over. That is not high technology. It is knowledge, labour, and a modest quantity of material.

Around it sits four more. Each map onto a stream Sustainable Lanka already runs.

Decentralised water. This means rainwater harvesting at household and school level, greywater reuse, and the restoration of those 622 broken water schemes. In every case, there must be a named community body that owns the asset, collects a tariff, and repairs the pump when it fails. If a project paper does not name that body and the money that funds maintenance, we have not built infrastructure but bought a monument.

Household energy. Solar with battery storage can reduce dependence on the grid. That grid is about to be squeezed twice — once by the drought, and again by the cost of the thermal generation that replaces hydropower.

Early warning that actually arrives. Not national bulletins, but a village roster: who calls whom, who checks the house at the end of the lane, and who knows which slope moves. It costs almost nothing, but it saves lives. So does livelihood diversification through drought-tolerant crops, alternative income, and the training that makes it possible.

And one more, unglamorous, and probably the highest-value hour any of us could spend. Sit with a family that holds no deed. Walk their file through the Divisional Secretariat before the November rain arrives.

Every one of those measures runs through a structure that already exists. Under the Praja Shakthi program, the Government has established close to fourteen thousand Community Development Councils. That is roughly one at every Grama Niladhari division on the island. It is the Village Development Committee, already built at national scale. What is missing is the technical partner: the engineer, the trainer, the auditor. That is exactly what an international Rotary partnership could provide.

Let me close.

Behind the Rotary Foundation’s Cyclone Ditwah Response Fund sits the Rotary global grant mechanism. It was built precisely to fund community-owned outcomes through an international partnership. Sustainable Lanka is offering to co-host them. The diaspora gave generously in December to funds they had no way to audit.

However, the deadline that matters is the first heavy rain of the Maha season. On the current forecast, it falls in late September. From tonight, that is only four weeks. The flooding is forecast for November. That will be in nine weeks.

Assistance is what we provide when we cannot bear to do nothing. It is necessary and humane. Assistance is measured by what we hand over. Empowerment is measured by what a community can do for itself when the next disaster arrives. This time, unusually, we know roughly when that happens.

So, I will conclude with four questions.

First. For each of the Ditwah projects — who owns the asset, who maintains it, and with what money?

Second. Did the community choose the project, or did you?

Third. Are we reaching the families who fell outside the lists, with no deed, no formal livelihood, and no one to file their paperwork?

Fourth. Which projects will be finished, and working, before this November?

Ditwah struck a country that had no warning. This time there is a warning. It is unusually confident, and it has been public since June.

A movement that acts on a warning is not only doing charity work. It is building a community’s capacity to feed itself, school its children, and stand through what is coming.

The water went down. It is going to come back. Let us be ready this time.

Thank you.