What is a project-affected person (PAP)?

A project-affected person is anyone who loses land, assets, income or access to resources because of a project — whether or not they own anything, and whether or not they have to move. The term matters because being recorded as one is what creates an entitlement. People routinely assume they do not qualify, and are wrong.

Two kinds of displacement

Physical displacement is losing your home and having to relocate. Economic displacement is losing income, land or access to resources without necessarily moving at all.[1]

The second is far more common and far more often overlooked. A trader whose stall is removed, a farmer who loses a strip of a field, a herder whose water point is fenced off, a fisher whose catch ends when a river is dammed — all are project-affected persons, and none of them necessarily move house.

People who qualify and often assume they do not

• Tenants, of homes and of business premises.
• Sharecroppers and people farming land borrowed from a relative.
• Employees of a business that is displaced.
• People occupying land they have no title to, including on public land.
• Users of common resources — grazing, firewood, water, fishing grounds.
• Adult children farming a defined portion of a parent's holding.
• Women whose use of family land runs through a male relative's claim.

Under the standards, eligibility does not depend on holding a claim the law recognises. What it depends on is being affected, as at a properly disclosed cut-off date.[2]

The three eligibility categories

1. Formal legal rights — title or a registered interest. Compensation for land and assets, plus assistance.
2. Claims recognisable under national law, including customary holdings. Treated substantially the same.
3. No recognisable claim — compensation for the structures and crops you put there, and resettlement assistance sufficient to restore your livelihood, though not payment for the land itself.[3]

How you become one on paper

Through the census. A survey team records households, assets and claims before a declared cut-off date, and that register is what every later entitlement is calculated from.

Which is why being present, being recorded in your own name, and getting a copy of what was recorded matters more than any later argument about rates.[4] If the draft register is displayed publicly, check your entry — that display exists precisely so omissions can be corrected before payments start.