Last year The Forrester Foundation supported more than 500 people across Sri Lanka — from emergency elephant-conflict responders in Udawalawe, to turtle-nesting volunteers in Rekawa, to tea-smallholders replanting cloud forest on the Sinharaja fringe. Not one of those numbers would exist without the UK donors and volunteers who back this work. Here is what the past twelve months looked like on the ground.
Elephant corridor watch: fewer night raids, fewer gunshots
Our oldest programme, now in its twelfth year, had its quietest harvest season on record in the buffer villages around Udawalawe and Lunugamvehera. Community monitors logged 312 night events between October 2023 and March 2024 — about a third fewer than the previous maha — and fired zero retaliatory shots. The three biggest factors: working torches (we replaced 24 during the year), a functioning radio network with credit that didn't run out, and a simple klaxon-and-light protocol that turns herds humanely rather than confronting them. Crucially, our Sri Lankan field lead reports that no elephants were killed in any of the four villages we support during the reporting period. That is not a claim we can make every year, so we do not make it lightly this year either.
Rekawa turtle guardians: a record hatchery year
Nesting conditions were kinder than we expected. The Rekawa Turtle Trust, working with our funded night-patrol team, recorded 1,148 nests between February and October 2024 across the five species we monitor. Critically — and this is the number we are proudest of — only nine clutches were lost to poaching, compared with 47 the year before. The difference is the patrols. Weekly Saturday beach clean-ups continued throughout the season, with 38 tonnes of washed-up plastic removed by local fishers, schoolchildren and volunteers. Hatchling entanglement with shoreline plastic fell by roughly half, though our data on this is still patchy and we are working with the University of Ruhuna marine lab to make it better.
Sinharaja buffer planting: 11,400 saplings, and a new co-operative
We set out to plant 10,000 native cloud-forest saplings across three catchments adjacent to the Sinharaja reserve. We planted 11,400, and — more importantly — survival at the one-year mark is 74 percent, which is well above the regional average for reforestation on degraded tea land. A fourth village co-operative (at Deniyaya) joined the programme in June 2024 and will begin planting in the April 2025 window. All of this is mapped, photographed and available on request.
Ruhuna ranger placements: 24 volunteers, zero safeguarding incidents
Two cohorts of twelve volunteers each — March and September — completed seven-week placements with Sri Lankan rangers in Tissamaharama. We had zero safeguarding incidents, zero serious medical events, and — we say this carefully — a significant increase in the number of applicants with relevant postgraduate or professional backgrounds. That is the kind of applicant we can deploy responsibly.
What this cost, and what we spent it on
In the financial year to 30 September 2024, our UK paid-staff costs were zero. Every pound of UK-raised income moved as restricted grants to our three named Sri Lankan field partners, against documented expenditure. Our unaudited figures will be published in the statutory annual return in January; the audited accounts follow in April. If you would like the field-partner reports that underpin any of the above, please email hello@forresterfoundation.org. We'd rather show you the evidence than ask you to take our word for it.
Conservation doesn't look dramatic from the outside. It looks like a torch that works on Tuesday night. It looks like a Saturday morning beach clean-up in the rain. It looks like a sapling someone watered when they could have gone home. Thank you for making all of it possible.
— The trustees and field partners, October 2024