OREANDA-NEWS. December 19, 2014. World Bank Country Manager for Tajikistan Patricia Veevers-Carter and the Government of Tajikistan project team visited the Khatlon Province earlier this week to meet with beneficiaries and partners of the Second Tajikistan Public Employment for Sustainable Agriculture and Water Resources Management Project (PAMP II) financed by the World Bank.

The project aims to benefit over 770,000 people in twelve districts of Khatlon Oblast through temporary public employment opportunities and rehabilitation of important irrigation and drainage infrastructure. It is a follow up project to a successfully completed first project, which benefitted over 43,000 households through public works and improved access to irrigation.

In Kurghan Tube, Ms. Veevers-Carter met with local civil society organizations who play an important role in the project implementation. They carry out awareness raising, community mobilization, and monitoring and evaluation activities jointly with the population and local administration to ensure that the temporary employment program is transparent and covers the poorest households, and that any complaints by affected people are addressed.

“The civil society organizations work closely with communities to ensure that local population, especially women, are aware of the public employment program and have all the information they need to apply for participation in this program,” said Patricia Veevers-Carter. “By providing temporary employment opportunities we are helping rural households not only earn additional income, but also improve access to irrigation so they could get higher crop yields from their land for many years to come.”

Furthermore, the project improves access to banking services, as all beneficiaries’ earnings are deposited in their bank account, which is often the first time that a beneficiary opens such an account.  

In Rumi District, the World Bank Country Manager met with participants of the manual cleaning of on-farm irrigation canals. The project implementation has started in the first three target districts - Jomi, Rumi and Jilikul – with more than 4,000 people being employed in cleaning of the canals. The project helped clean the total of 1,211 km of the prioritized secondary and tertiary canals and 223 km of collector and drainage networks. It also helped rehabilitate 16 km of irrigation canals, 590 outlet gates, and 197 observation wells in these three districts.

In Pyanj District, where project activities were just launched, Ms. Veevers-Carter met with the Chairman of the District Mr. Tavakkalzoda. They discussed possible solutions that the project could bring for rehabilitation and maintenance of the irrigation facilities, which suffer from heavy sedimentation from the Pyanj River.                            

Ms. Veevers-Carter also met with members of the local Water Users Association (WUA) “Navruz”. As WUAs play an important role in maintaining the irrigation infrastructure, the project works to establish and strengthen 20 new WUAs as well as provide training and capacity building to 33 existing WUAs in the project areas.