Nearly three-quarters of the world’s Indigenous Peoples live in Asia and the Pacific. Their rights are increasingly threatened by development programs that could encroach on areas they traditionally own, occupy, use, or view as ancestral domain.

ADB’s Indigenous Peoples safeguards aim to ensure that the design and implementation of projects foster full respect for Indigenous Peoples’ identity, dignity, human rights, livelihood systems, and cultural uniqueness as defined by the Indigenous Peoples themselves so that they receive culturally appropriate social and economic benefits, are not harmed by the projects, and can participate actively in projects that affect them.

For a project with impacts on Indigenous Peoples, the SPS requires borrowers to carry out meaningful consultation and to prepare and implement an Indigenous Peoples plan. The plan includes measures to ensure that Indigenous Peoples benefit, and that adverse impacts are prevented, or where this is not possible, mitigated. The SPS requires that broad community support of affected Indigenous Peoples’ communities be ascertained for project activities to which Indigenous Peoples are deemed particularly vulnerable.