In order to improve the citizen participation aspect in the infrastructure subprojects a lot of actions were taken and a qualitative improvement was made.

First, a meeting in Tirana with all the mayors that will benefit investments from ADF subprojects, it was made clear all the social aspects of the work; the community participation during all the phases, the possible problems with the land ownership, we briefed them on the importance of the agreements on the land and other procedures of ADF.

Second, we organized open meetings in each subproject village in order to inform them about the project, how they did profit it, how it will be implemented, who is ADF. People were asked to confirm or reelect the Counsel and Monitoring Groups-s make them aware of the property issues. More than 1000 citizens participated in these meetings in 37 subprojects financed by the World Bank and Albanian Government. 

There was a qualitative improvement regarding the transparency of the design and prevention of the ownership problems. ADF organized community meetings where a draft of the design was presented by the designer. Representatives of the LGU and communities were asked to give their opinions and share their concerns about the design, depending on the specifics of the terrain, special requests from the community and land ownership problems. The result of this meeting was the fact that some of the people’s requests were reflected in the design or, in the cases where this was not possible, the citizens were clarified about the technical impossibilities for the reflection of their problems. Around 700 people participated in those meetings. Another result we would like to focus on is the work done for the prevention of ownership conflicts, a common obstacle for the timely implementation of the investments.  The meetings with the designer and special meetings held with the land owners, where necessary, contributed in the signing of around 90 voluntary agreements with the land owners who committed to give part of their lands according to the design and not be an obstacle for the works implementation.

A special attention is paid for the training and clarification of the community representatives, for the subprojects ongoing. A training of these community groups is currently happening in all the subprojects making these groups a real contributor for the monitoring of the works implementation. These trainings put a direct linkage between all the key actors of the works implementation (community, LGU, supervisor, contractor) and increase the transparency of the subproject implementation. We also distributed in the benefiting communities posters and leaflets with the main works contract data, contact details for CMG and ADF.