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Lesson
The assessment of benefits from new or renovated irrigation systems cannot be meaningfully compiled without detailed farm budgets (cropping patterns, yields, production costs, farm-gate prices).

Project Number: 45354-002
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
The selection of a single year as the baseline against which to measure the reduction in losses due to severe climate events is problematic. Since such events vary considerably from year to year, selecting a single year as the baseline can lead to distorted results. An alternative approach is to take the average of several years as the baseline. Another more meaningful alternative is to compare losses in areas protected by project works with similar neighboring areas without such works.

Project Number: 45354-002
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
A detailed assessment of water adequacy and the introduction of proper operation and maintenance measures and an adequate level of water charges are critical to successful outcome and long-term sustainability of irrigation projects.\

Project Number: 45354-002
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
Less stringent selection criteria, which enables the participation of more eligible financial institutions, could optimize the impact of microlending short-term, low-interest loans in unbanked but regularly earning agricultural communities. The selection of partner participating financial institutions (PFIs) for the microlending component of this project may have been too strict. This resulted in the participation of only 3 of the 6 large PFIs in Tajikistan, all of which are foreign-owned and likely to have been effective partners.

Project Number: 45389-001, 45389-002, 45389-003, 45389-004
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
Timing and location are essential to the participation of women in gender-related and other project activities. Implementation of this project’s gender action plan (GAP) was challenged by the wide geographic dispersion of households, which created difficulties in gathering project participants for training. The gender awareness campaigns also coincided with the harvest season, which made it difficult for farmer-beneficiaries to take part.

Project Number: 45389-001, 45389-002, 45389-003, 45389-004
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
A thorough assessment of the financial management capacity of executing agencies (EAs) is required to mitigate the risk of financial issues disrupting project implementation or leading to non-compliance to loan covenants/grant agreements. The Agency for Land Reclamation and Irrigation (ALRI), the EA for 2 of this project’s 4 intended outputs, did not monitor the commercial bank that held the advance accounts for said outputs. When the bank became insolvent, part of the advance accounts was frozen, and was refunded only after government intervention albeit with significant delay.

Project Number: 45389-001, 45389-002, 45389-003, 45389-004
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
A project focusing on microfinance could help remove obstacles to micro-insurance or other risk transfer schemes in the agricultural sector. The project did not create a market for micro-insurance as envisaged.

Project Number: 45389-001, 45389-002, 45389-003, 45389-004
Project Name: Building Climate Resilience in the Pyanj River Basin
Report Date:
Lesson
During TA implementation, coordination was found to impact efficiency and effectiveness. In countries where coordination needs to be improved, the project team’s level of involvement is critical.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
Consultants can be tapped to train the government ministries/agencies, which in turn are expected to train other stakeholders. However, this requires a long-term commitment to recognize improved capacities and the retention of ministry-trained staff by offering incentives.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
Institutional arrangements need to be robust and well-coordinated to deliver results. It must be clearly recognized for designing a large size and regional TA projects, especially involving multiple countries and development partners. Capacity needs assessment can serve as basis for specifying focus activities by country and targeting the scope of capacity building.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
An analysis of priority stakeholders can yield a clearer idea of the cost-time effort required to reach these beneficiaries, given transport and communication constraints.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
Taking into account foreign exchange risk during TA design stage is important. Also, devising appropriate risk mitigating strategies or mechanism to address foreign exchange rate volatility is useful. This strategy could include the use of a currency conversion mechanism where donor funds are converted upon receipt into either one specific currency that is to be the primary use currency (e.g., USD), or a balanced mix of currencies (as used by the World Bank) are held so that the project funds are not so susceptible to the fluctuations of any one currency during project implementation.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
Developing a cadre of locally based trainers through a ‘training of trainers’ approach has been shown to be a very effective method of increasing capacity of those trained, while also retaining such capacity within the national and local areas.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
An additional lesson is having an important facilitative role in attracting donor funding even without substantial investments of its own, ADB can leverage its knowledge and connections to implement significant projects in collaboration with other stakeholders.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date:
Lesson
A lesson from this TA is that the benefits of a regional TA approach seem strong in terms of applicability among GMS countries, and the potential for improving standards and value chains across different product categories is great. As one gets into the “retail” side of capacity development (where farmer and other producer beneficiaries are trained on how to produce according to the standards), the costs vis-à-vis the benefits of TAs from different activities and for different stakeholder groups may need to be shown before they attract donor buy-ins.

Project Number: 39542-022
Project Name: Implementing the Greater Mekong Subregion Core Agriculture Support Program (Phase 2)
Report Date: