Community involvement was substantial during project implementation and proved to be crucial in integrative flood and river erosion management. Advocacy and capacity development of community stakeholders enabled them to understand the complex flood risk management Cultural norms regarding women's roles in society were carefully navigated.
Strengthening the livelihood base of vulnerable communities in newly protected flood plains is imperative. The approach improved community relations and executing agency. Future grants could better support the participation of marginalized people through in-kind support and/or a participation allowance.
It is good practice to prepare detailed designs at an early stage, using advance contracting and retroactive financing. Finalizing resettlement plans after detailed designs are made helps reduce resettlement plan variations.
A social protection system needs to evolve in line with changes in the socioeconomic conditions of a country. This program supported social protection system reform, requiring the government's continued commitment for sustainable implementation. A key lesson highlighted by this project is for social protection systems to continue transforming in the face of demographic changes and urbanization and to be shock-responsive.
The need for proper arrangements to meet customary ceremony requirements, which can cause delays, should be anticipated in future project designs. For example, because a sacred cemetery to the community was identified at the construction site of a project package, a customary ceremony was needed and conducted to meet the local community's religious requirements.
A draft proposal on income restoration and rehabilitation programs need to be prepared along with the safeguard plans to avoid delays in safeguards implementation. In this project, contractors of four packages should have deployed fulltime environmental and occupational safety and health personnel to raise awareness and enforce the safeguard requirements for subcontractors and workers.
In projects where institutional and financial capacity is relatively strong, ADB's financial additionality can be demonstrated by instilling proper design and implementation of social and environmental safeguards in infrastructure projects.
Creativity in implementing subprojects to minimize safeguards issues is critical in avoiding major delays. This was demonstrated in the redesign of irrigation canals and the installation of a box culvert in one of the project sites.
Timely orientation and training of relevant stakeholders on social safeguards will help avoid related difficulties and problems. All entitled households were compensated according to
the updated resettlement plans. However, detailed measurement survey errors and mistakes in
implementing the voluntary land donation resulted in some payments being made after the commencement of construction work. A corrective action plan approved by ADB was subsequently implemented and all payments were completed.
A thorough needs assessment is necessary to align the livelihood restoration training programs to the needs of severely affected households (SAHs) and so increase their uptake of the programs. Only a few SAHs attended the livelihood restoration programs designed to support them. The opportunity cost in terms of farmers’ time was high either because the SAHs were involved in more rewarding economic activities, or the trainings did not respond to their needs.