The SEDR project was a European Union-funded initiative implemented by the British Council in partnership with The Asia Foundation to support effective, rights-based alternative dispute resolution at community level in Sri Lanka. From 2020 to 2025, SEDR worked with civil society, government stakeholders, community leaders, and young people across six districts to improve people-centered justice and strengthen social cohesion through alternative dispute resolution initiatives.
About the SEDR Project
Supporting Effective Dispute Resolution (SEDR) was a 5-year project, funded by the European Union to the value of €7 million, and implemented by the British Council in partnership with The Asia Foundation from 2020 to 2025. At the overall level SEDR’s aim was to strengthen dialogue between the people and the state, thereby contributing to the resolution of critical underlying causes of conflict and the prevention of the escalation of local disputes into wider problems. At the specific level, SEDR aimed to improve dispute resolution services for both individual and community level grievances in Sri Lanka's Northern, Eastern and Uva Provinces.
This specific objective was broken down into two main streams of work, the first of which focussed on disputes between individuals through building the capacity of Sri Lanka’s National Mediation Programme under the auspices of the Mediation Boards Commission and the Ministry of Justice and National Integration in close partnership with The Asia Foundation. Sri Lanka’s National Mediation Programme is a globally unique hybrid-model which has been in operation for 3 decades, is state funded, consists of >340 Community Mediation Boards & Special Mediation Boards island-wide, where more than 8,500 well trained volunteer mediators use an interest-based mediation model to deal with ±250,000 individual disputes annually. This model is therefore a cheap and fast people-centred alternative to the formal justice system.
The second stream of SEDR’s work, delivered through a small group of dedicated Civil Society grant partners, aimed to strengthen Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) capacity of local forums to address broader community level grievances in conflict affected, vulnerable and poor communities across six districts namely Badulla, Monaragala, Ampara, Trincomalee, Mannar and Vavuniya in the project’s three target provinces.
Over a 5-year period SEDR delivered a series of ground-breaking interventions including the generation of evidence through targeted research, building dispute resolution capacity of duty-bearers, enhancing awareness amongst right-holders, and building trust between diverse local communities to strengthen social cohesion. SEDR’s work included a specific focus on facilitating inter-cultural dialogue through youth led social action, as well as the use of creative arts for dialogue and inclusion. SEDR also supported Sri Lanka's School Mediation Programme, through which more than 280 educators and 1,700 secondary school student peer-mediators were equipped to resolve disputes and foster a culture of dialogue and tolerance among young people.