With less than a year remaining before the loan financing for the delayed, World Bank-funded Metro Manila flood control expires, the government is accelerating project rollout, the Washington-based multilateral lender said.

Since its previous implementation status and results report last November, the World Bank on Jan. 29 pointed to recent “important progress” in the Metro Manila Flood Management Project.

“First, over 64 percent of the target population now benefits from improved flood protection, with more than 1,500 hectares (ha) of flood-prone areas cleared within 24 hours after heavy rainfall,” the World Bank said.

“Second, the project has successfully resettled the majority of informal settler families from high-risk zones, to ensure safer and more sustainable communities,” it added.

The lender noted that recent key actions include adopting black soldier fly (BSF) technology for organic waste management, replacing the original materials recovery facility, resettling most informal settler families, and implementing plans to address remaining relocation and safeguard issues.

“As the project enters its final year, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) are focused on completing all works and ensuring the project meets its development objectives by November 2026,” the report read.

To date, $116.26 million, or 62.86 percent, of the reduced $184.94-million World Bank loan for the project has been disbursed, leaving $68.68 million to be spent before the financing closes on Nov. 30 this year.

From the counterpart financing provided by the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), also amounting to $184.94 million, $115.66 million, or 62.54 percent, has been disbursed so far, leaving $69.28 million in undisbursed funds about 10 months before they expire.

The World Bank continues to rate the project as “moderately satisfactory” in terms of overall implementation progress.

As Manila Bulletin reported earlier, the Philippine government and the World Bank in November 2024 signed amendments to their loan agreement for the original $207.6-million project financing, including a two-year extension of the originally seven-year implementation period, which was supposed to lapse in 2024.

To recall, the Philippines in 2017 borrowed a combined $415.2 million from the World Bank and the AIIB to bankroll most of the costs of the project, which was originally intended to protect 1.7 million Filipinos living near 56 “potentially critical” drainage systems across 11,110 hectares (ha) of flood-prone areas in the National Capital Region (NCR).

Through the national budget, the government was to shoulder the remaining $84.8 million for the $500-million flood control project, which is jointly implemented by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), DPWH, and MMDA.

Implementation, however, had been sluggish—beginning with project design issues and delays in determining the number and location of drainage and pumping station sites. Red tape also slowed procurement.

Because the project rollout was prolonged, the Philippines missed its original goal of completing it in 2024 to ensure that targeted NCR areas would be free of floodwaters within 24 hours after major rainfall.

Had the World Bank– and AIIB-backed project been implemented as scheduled, flooding experienced in the aftermath of the past two years’ strong typhoons that battered Metro Manila could have been avoided.

In addition to extending the loan closing date, the World Bank also agreed to the Philippine government’s proposal to cut $22.7 million each from the two lenders’ counterpart financing.

Despite the scaled-back loan amounts, the Philippines will continue to repay the concessional, or low-interest, loans over a 25-year period, inclusive of a 14-year grace period under the original 2017 agreement.

While loan restructuring documents reviewed by Manila Bulletin in 2024 partly blamed stringent Covid-19 lockdowns for the slow rollout, the World Bank also lamented that “frequent changes within the MMDA leadership (five chairmen in five years) further impacted procurement and disbursements.”

“The sum of these challenges set project implementation back by roughly two years,” the World Bank said in 2024.