Completed headgate along DFC and NMC at Marabong River TS Undertaken by FRD Construction.

The Second Irrigation Systems Improvement Project (ISIP II), one of the major irrigation projects in Region VIII, will be completed this year.

ISIP II is an Asian Development Bank (ADB) funded project. The project's goal is poverty alleviation. It is expected to reduce poverty incidence from 72 percent in 1997 to 42 percent in 2004 in affected areas through increase in household income of around 12,000 farm households. It is essentially a package of mutually supportive and interlinked measures designed to improve water distribution system, introduce rotational irrigation at the farm level and develop mechanisms to increase farmer/IA participation and responsibility.

The project covers the rehabilitation of nine irrigation systems in Leyte Province. The service area for rehabilitation is 12,249 hectares with an additional area of 2,209 hectares for development. The project is on-going with an overall physical accomplishment of 78.19 percent as of December 2003.

The extent of physical accomplishments of the four main project components varies with the Agricultural Improvement Component having the highest accomplishment of 95.27 percent. This component consists of research cum demonstration, farmers training, monitoring and evaluation, enterprise support for women, farm in out support services project ,ISF collection activities and the modified rotational operation. This component mainly aims to increase production through the introduction of new farm technologies, improve water distribution system and the introduction of rotational irrigation at the farm level

Completed headgate and canal lining along Marabong main canal undertaken by Aqualine Construction.

Meanwhile, the physical infrastructure component's overall actual accomplishment is 86.29 percent and this surpassed the target by 2.93 percent. The irrigation system with the highest accomplishment is the Bao RIS with 99.7 percent and followed by the Binahaan North RIS with 98.28 percent. The newly added Marabong transfer has an accomplishment of 52.89 percent. In terms of area rehabilitated, restored and generated, the total actual accomplishment is 12,448 hectares of which 8,297 hectares were rehabilitated, 3,050 hectares were restored and 1,101 hectares were newly generated.

On the other hand, the Institutional Development Component consist of training and organizing the farmers, building post harvest facilities and benefit monitoring and evaluation. To increase the farmers participation and responsibility the project organized and trained the farmers and its actual accomplishment is already 96 percent. Post harvest facilities (PHF) were also provided to the farmers and out of the overall target of 59 PHFs, 29 has been completed and 21 on-going. The actual accomplishment of this component is already 87.27%.

The project was started in March 1997 and supposedly to be completed last December 2002, however, due to adjustments in the foreign currency, the project cost was revised from P1.172 billion to P1.883 billion and was extended to December 2004. The Marabong Transfer Scheme was added in its program of work.