Environmental Assessment
Volume B-5.1
Mine
Socioeconomics
Ambatovy Project
330
January 2006
The socioeconomic mitigations that require some monitoring effort beyond the
operational monitoring include pre-employment training and other education
programs, such as support to keeping children in school and public education in
health; HIV/AIDS programs; workforce management in so far as this may effect
quality of life in nearby communes; construction and maintenance of the pipeline
access road; and natural resource compensation agreements. These are specific
measures being put in place by the project to achieve specific objectives and can
be evaluated as to the degree to which these objectives are being met.
The project will contract for the services of a specialist third-party organization,
to develop a monitoring program to be implemented at least annually during the
first five years of the project, beginning with the construction phase. Subsequent
to the first five years, additional monitoring requirements will be discussed with
project-affected people and local authorities.
Some of this will prove challenging. As an example, consider the effectiveness
of HIV/AIDS programs in the Toamasina area. We do not have good baseline
data on current HIV/AIDS rates, but the suspicion is that despite Madagascar
generally low rates of prevalence, the situation at Toamasina may be somewhat
worse. Baseline information needs to be collected and the HIV/AIDS program
needs to be developed in detail, including targets relative to baseline information.
Subsequent incidence rates, within and outside the project workforce would
represent a good indicator of program effectiveness, but the degree to which the
project has contributed to incidence will be hard to disentangle from other
contributing factors.
As opposed to the operational (i.e. compliance) monitoring, the monitoring of the
effectiveness of many socioeconomic mitigations requires specialized expertise
working with affected people and agencies to establish the detail of the
monitoring program. To be most effective, such monitoring would seek to
ensure affected people’s participation in the selection of indicators, the collection
of data and the interpretation of these data.
Monitoring for Adaptive Management
This EA has come to a number of conclusions about the probability and
mitigability of several other potential effects – on individual, family and
community economic, social and cultural well-being – which also need to be
included in a socioeconomic monitoring plan. These conclusions most
importantly are that i) overall net positive effects are likely, although there may
be negative dimensions at the individual and/or community level that are part of
an overall net improvement; ii) many such negative dimensions are unpredictable
in their detail; and iii) there are no obvious means of mitigating these, without
