US$69 million project works ‘to build peace and enhance social inclusion’ for 50,000 poor rural families

	A portrait of cowboys and cattle in the background at the indigenous reservation "El Vigia", 18 km from Arauqita where a community of Guahibos Indians live and raise cattle. ©IFAD/Franco Mattioli

Rome, 3 October 2012 – Representatives from the Government of Colombia and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) signed last week a loan agreement for a new US$69.92 million rural poverty reduction project that will reach over 50,000 families living in poverty in rural Colombia.  

The far-reaching Building Rural Entrepreneurial Capacities: Trust and Opportunity Project will work in 17 Colombian Departments over a geographic range of more than 200,000 square kilometres to reach especially at-risk groups that include women, indigenous peoples, afro-Colombians, youth and families displaced by internal conflict.

“The Trust and Opportunity Project provides the Government of Colombia with an unprecedented opportunity to build peace and enhance social inclusion, and to reduce inequalities in the country,” said IFAD Associate Vice President Kevin Cleaver during the loan signing ceremony at the United Nations’ rural poverty agency’s Rome headquarters.

The project seeks to improve food security, ease access to financial and community services, increase incomes for small-scale producers by as much as 32 per cent, and create mechanisms to rebuild the social fabric of a country that has witnessed war and endemic violence for more than 30 years.

The Colombian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development will implement the project, which benefits from US$50 million in IFAD financing, including US$20 million from the Spanish Food Security Co-Financing Facility Trust Fund. The Government of Colombia will provide US$5.76 million in financing with US$13.7 million in joint funding from project participants that will work specifically to generate savings mobilization, insurance and funding for microenterprises.

“The project introduces a number of innovations, including the use of mobile banking in remote rural areas, the establishment of a special fund to support youth enterprise development, and the piloting of new data-gathering technologies for monitoring project progress and impact,” Cleaver said.

Colombia is a middle-income country that has made good progress in achieving peace and economic stability in recent years.

Nevertheless, in the Colombian countryside, approximately 7 million people live below the poverty line, and 2 million are considered to be extremely poor. Around 13 per cent of the population do not have sufficient incomes to meet their basic food needs, and approximately 3.6 million people have been displaced by internal conflict.

IFAD has funded rural empowerment projects in Colombia since 1981 with over US$93 million in total funding. 

Press Release No.: IFAD/58/2012

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) works with poor rural people to enable them to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives. Since 1978, IFAD has invested almost US$14 billion in grants and low-interest loans to developing countries through projects empowering about 400 million people to break out of poverty, thereby helping to create vibrant rural communities. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized UN agency based in Rome – the United Nations’ food and agriculture hub. It is a unique partnership of 168 members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD).