Sampath Bank’s Embilipitya branch supports Elephant Transit Home
In 1995, the Department of Wildlife Conservation initiated a major step for the welfare and conservation of orphaned baby elephants, establishing a place called “Ath Athuru Sevana” (Elephant Transit Home - ETH) in the Udawalawe. Here orphaned elephant calves are taken care of until they could survive on their own when released back to the wild.
Currently, ETH has 33 baby elephants in the Transit Home and the government of Sri Lanka spends a large sum of money to maintain the facility and look after these babies.
ETH need ample amount of water for its day-to-day activities. Water is needed for cleaning, preparing milk and grassland managements etc. During the dry spell of the year, demand for water is very high as the water level of Udawalawe reservoir drastically drops. To fulfill the water requirement ETH constructed the large and deep well to pump the water. So far ETH has been able to establish solar powered water pumping mechanism and laying the pipe lines to transport the water. Though water is pumpd from the well, there is no possibility to regulate the mechanism.
As a responsible corporate citizen, Sampath Bank’s Embilipitiya branch has come forward to fulfill the crying need of the orphanage funding two water tanks (with 10,000 liter capacity) and also hording that displays instructions and the importance of the venue.
The Transit Home is a lively place. Feeding the calves with milk every three hours is a recurring job throughout the 365 days of the year. When there are very small elephant calves, they are fed once every two hours. Thousands of local and foreign visitors have opportunity to observe the beauty of milk feeding that is happening every three hours of the day. An average of 20000 visitors visits ETH every month. The Sri Lankan elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Sampath Bank’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is based on the 5E model, falling under the theme ‘Empowering Community’. Shifting from Voluntary CSR to Obligatory CSR, the bank has introduced various mechanisms to enhance employee engagement, aligning all CSR initiatives with core business objectives and core competencies. Here the bank spreads out bank level CSR projects in rural and semi urban sectors and focuses on small and medium scale projects to share the benefit with greater number of beneficiaries. This is being done through developing partnerships, strategic agreements and industry collaboration with respective bodies.