Summary
SF's focus on immediate relief, followed by rehabilitation assistance was to enable the affected communities to recover from losses to normal life situation by restoring and strengthening livelihood activities through appropriate mechanism.

More than 30,000 tsunami affected families in 11 districts were assisted with emergency relief assistance costing NOK 2,713,075. SF also supplied 3000 ready made tents to the affected people through the government while more than 200 transitional shelters and 166 toilets were constructed to the value of NOK 2,042,687. SF’s mandate and focus are on livelihood support, more than any other intervention. Therefore, 7601 families were provided with livelihood support totalling a sum of NOK 4,616,245. This indirectly benefits more than 14,000 families. More than 500 pre-school children were given the opportunity to start schooling by replacing infrastructure and educational support worth NOK 54,806.

Co-ordination
The unprecedented global response to the disaster generated a huge volume of funding for international NGOs from private, bilateral and multilateral sources. Pressures to rapidly implement relief efforts and spend donor funds on schedule have been intense. SF's planning has been hampered by ineffective coordination among these numerous competing organizations and the government's inability to establish effective coordination policies and structures. Within this context, SF worked through local partner NGOs, identifying the needs and the gaps that are prevailing in the areas, and coordinating nationally with CNO, FAO, Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Social Welfare and the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies (CHA) in order to meet the standards of the activities we carried out.

Sensitivity to Conflict Situation
SF’s interventions were mainly in the East. We are working with all three major communities ensuring a balance and applying Do No Harm principles in the interventions. In addition we moved to the North as well through our new partner Wholistic Health Centre (WHC) in promoting Psycho Social activities. A sum of NOK 166.511 was provided to train over 60 Psycho-social counsellors. The programme has gained momentum meeting the needs and has reached around 2000 persons including 220 children who are affected by war and tsunami.

Decentralisation and Strengthening of Local Partners
Local NGOs have been strengthened with local expertise to support and reinforce their capacity in managing projects. Moreover, 6 local and expatriate volunteers were brought to help the local partners to address capacity building of SF partners through Fredskorpset. A National Workshop was organized with GTZ, PLAN International and SF to create a forum to have a policy on Post Tsunami Microfinance to maintain its commitment towards sustainability and promote best practices of the industry.

Participation of Tsunami Victims
In most cases the affected communities have become passive recipients. However within our projects, our partners liaised with the victims as well as the authorities in designing work plans accordingly, in order to get the maximum participation of the recipients and the stakeholders.

Use of Local Resources
In accordance with our policy, since all our Partners are from the areas we work, they managed to a great extent to use local manpower resources as well as local material and technical resources from the same areas, with the exception of importing tents for immediate requirements of temporary shelter at the initial stage of the tsunami.

Corruption
SF's post-tsunami relief and rehabilitation and development programme is being carried out in a complex social and political environment. The government is exploiting the opportunity to implement controversial policies such as establishing a coastal zone, relocation of population into planned townships and national control over the revival of the fishing industry. Three SF partners’ services were terminated due to lack of capacity and good governance.