This community consultation and participation were a great opportunity for the programme to have a participatory and inclusive plan and let farmers have a better understanding of the programme’s overall goal and their contribution to the activities implementation.

ESIA Document Review & Approval

Concerning the Environmental and Social Impact assessment document review, schemes studied under PASIDEP I and II are reviewed and some of these schemes document quality is assured by independent consultants. In this case, ESIA document review, field appraisal, and approval by the accredited organization is conducted for 154 SSI schemes. This result includes those documents that came from PASIDP I and qualified as per the PASIDP II  SECAP quality standards. After familiarization of the PASIDP II SECAP for stakeholders and partners at all levels, and TOT training delivered for technical experts and serious review of the study and design documents, the quality of ESIA and ESMP documents shown great improvement. But in this part, some parts of the document such as adverse impact rating, environmental flow quantification, and analysis, climate risk identification, and analysis, proper ESMP preparation shown quality problem due to technical capacity limitation. 

Personal Protective equipment Demonstration

Farmers who are practicing irrigation agriculture are accustomed to using pesticides by procuring chemicals from the local markets, to control production loss caused by pests and diseases. But, their trend of using Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), proper dosage, appropriate chemicals are very weak. There is also a gap in handling, storage, and management of chemicals and materials used for pest and disease control. An effort has been made to provide training to IWUA members for the proper application and management of these chemicals and  473 PPE materials supplied for IWUAs as a demonstration. As a result, there are better improvements among trained farmers and neighbors through the skills they acquire from practical training.

ESMP Implementation & Mentoring

Based on IFAD’s supervision and support mission’s comment, a dedicated budget is allocated for environmental and social monitoring and management. Based on this, the implementing agency (Water Resource Bureau) and regulatory body Environmetn Forest and climate change commission (EFCCC) have been jointly monitoring social and environmental concerns/impacts. This has created a platform to engage partners and stakeholders to play their roles in their respective responsibilities of the programme. To this end, it was planned to monitor ESMP activities at woreda level for 150 schemes including PASIDP-I schemes which are under agricultural development and to date 116 schemes are monitored and supported by woreda experts, and two round joint monitoring and support was conducted by regional experts (from implementing agencies (IAs) & RPCMU) who are responsible to monitor and support the implementation of ESMP. The monitoring of activities during construction and operation especially by EFCCC and IAs has brought positive results in quality work, solving grievance, and strengthening of IWUA.

Enviromental & Social Safeguards Compliance Audit

For any programme having its own ESMF, an environmental, and social audit should be undertaken by environmental regulatory to capture best practices and identify gaps, and to consider proactive measures for more effective and efficient implementations of the programme forthcoming activities. The social and environmental compliance audit of PASIDP II was conducted by each regional EPLAUA or regulatory body. The auditing task was focused on compliance audit which has been identified stemming from environmental safeguard under the PASIDP II and the overall implementation of the ESMF. For this audit, pertinent environment-related safeguards and working procedures were considered.

The environment and social compliance audit and overall evaluation were made for 66 sample small scale irrigation schemes in four programme regions vis-a-vis the safeguard tools and the GoE environmental protection policy and legal framework, taking into account the agreed ESMF environment requirements. The main gaps identified at the compliance audit are lacking identifying possible adverse environmental and social impacts (technical capacity), gaps in impact rating, ESMP preparation, and implementation of the planned environmental and social management plans by implementing partners.  Besides, the climate risk analysis part during ESIA document preparation was very weak. The identified impacts are shared for respective implementing agencies for future improvement.