Country strategy framework and lessons

IFAD and Regional Strategy

IFAD strategy. IFAD corporate strategy aimed at enabling the poor to overcome their poverty is based on the “centrality of access to assets for rural poverty reduction”. The term “assets” is used in its broadest sense, to include human and social assets (education, health, organizations, social capital), natural assets (land, water, forestry), technological assets (farm production, processing and marketing methods), infrastructures (transport, health care, communications), and financial assets (crop sales and off farm income, fixed and working capital, savings in kind and cash). Three major strategic prongs are set by IFAD to improve the access of poor rural people to these assets, namely:

• Strengthening the capacity of the rural poor and their organizations;
• Improving equitable access to productive natural resources and to technology; and
• Increasing access to financial services and to markets.

Regional strategy. Within the above framework, the Eastern and Southern Africa Division has developed, in the context of the specific features of the countries it is responsible for, the following main strategic prongs:

• Promotion of effective and equitable linkages between poor producers and market opportunities, particularly with the private sector;
• Development of rural financial services;
• Promoting improved and stable access to land and water, and better soil and water management;
• Creation of an improved system of managing knowledge, know-how, and the transfer of information and technology; and
• Moderating the impact of external exogenous shocks, such that of spreading HIV/AIDS and of civil disturbances and conflicts.