Closing a RAP: the completion report and what it has to prove

A resettlement programme does not end when the last payment clears. It ends when someone can demonstrate that the obligations were discharged — that people were paid what they were owed, that livelihoods were restored, that grievances were resolved, and that the households the plan identified as most at risk are not worse off.

The completion report is where that demonstration is made, and its quality is determined years earlier by what was recorded during implementation.

What closure requires

1. Entitlements discharged. Every household in the register either paid in full or with a documented reason for non-payment and a route still open.
2. Grievances closed. Not merely logged and aged out — closed, with the outcome recorded and the complainant informed.
3. Livelihood restoration measured against baseline, at household level, with results reported rather than activities counted.[4]
4. Vulnerable households individually accounted for, by name, with their status at last contact.
5. Physical delivery verified — housing occupied, land handed over, titles issued, temporary sites reinstated.
6. Outstanding obligations transferred to a named owner with a funded budget where anything continues past closure.

The three reconciliations

A completion report stands or falls on three reconciliations, each of which is arithmetic and each of which is either possible or not:

• Register to entitlement. Every affected person identified in the census maps to an entitlement determination, at a stated matrix version.
• Entitlement to payment. Every determination maps to a payment instruction, and every instruction to a confirmed receipt.
• Budget to disbursement. The compensation budget reconciles to what left the account, with variances explained by category rather than in total.[2]

Where these were maintained continuously they take days. Where they are attempted at closure from four disconnected systems, they take months and typically surface discrepancies nobody can now explain, because the people who could have are gone.[5]

Closure is an evidence exercise, and evidence has to be contemporaneous. Nothing assembled at the end can establish what a household was told in a meeting three years earlier.

Completion report and completion audit

They are different documents and are often confused. The completion report is prepared by or for the project and states what was done. The completion audit is an external assessment, conducted by someone independent, testing whether the obligations were met and whether livelihoods were restored.[1]

The audit will sample the register, visit households, and compare what it finds to what the report claims. So the report should be written in the knowledge that its assertions will be tested against the same records — which is an argument for stating unresolved items plainly rather than leaving them to be discovered.

Residual cases

Every programme closes with a residue: unlocated claimants, contested successions, parcels in litigation, households that refused the offer. These cannot all be resolved, and pretending otherwise weakens the report.

What closure requires is that each residual case be individually documented — what was offered, what was attempted to reach the person, what is outstanding — and that a mechanism remain open, with funds retained against it and a named institution able to pay. A residual liability with no funded owner is an unmet obligation described as a closed one.[3]

What the report should contain about failure

The most credible completion reports state what did not work: the livelihood component that reached fewer households than planned, the site that people left, the payment tail that ran two years long. An auditor reading a report with no negative findings assumes either that the monitoring was incapable of detecting problems or that the report is not candid, and both readings are worse than the finding would have been.

Handover

Finally, closure includes handing the record itself to whoever retains the obligation afterwards. That means the register, the entitlement determinations, the payment reconciliation, the grievance log and the monitoring data — in a form the receiving institution can query, with the change history intact.

A handover consisting of a PDF report and a folder of spreadsheets satisfies a contract and leaves the institution unable to answer the first question anyone asks it about a household. Since complaints about resettlement arrive years after closure, that is the question it will be asked.