Target group. The target group will comprise asset-poor rural households, with a special focus on women and young people who are actually or potentially rural microentreprise operators and/or commodity chain participants. Programme objectives. The programme's goal is to contribute to rural poverty reduction and non-agricultural income-generation through improved access to business development services for pro-poor rural microenterprise development. More specifically, the programme will facilitate the creation of new pro-poor rural microenterprises and commodity chain organizations or the strengthening of existing ones; and it will help the target group gain access to rural business development services, and to new technology, marketing infrastructure and subsector-related public goods and services. Programme description: In addition to programme management, the programme is expected to have three components, to be fined-tuned during programme design:
Potential cofinanciers. Interested cofinanciers are invited to contact IFAD. Photo caption 1: Photo by the Rural Microenterprise Support Project - Rural women selling snacks. Photo caption 2: Photo by the Rural Microenterprise Support Project - A worker promoting bottles of fruit juice produced by one of the many microenterprises supported by the project. |
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Programme area. The programme will be national in scope but will concentrate its activities in areas targeted by ongoing IFAD-supported projects and programmes.
Important features. The proposed programme is aligned with the country's poverty reduction strategy paper. It is also consistent with the IFAD Strategic Framework 2007-2010 and the strategic objectives set out in IFAD's 2007 country strategic opportunities programme. It will constitute the logical evolution of the Rural Microenterprise Support Project (PAMER), which has created and/or supported some 2,500 rural microenterprises in the country. It will scale up some activities that were key to the success of PAMER, but will also complement them with new activities. The recent generation of rural microenterprise and local development projects, spearheaded by PAMER, has spawned significant demand for the provision of business development services in rural Burkina Faso. Today, investing in the market for rural business development services represents a very important opportunity to be seized, with IFAD being among the best placed to do so. Two of the programme's innovations are noteworthy. The first is the rural technology research and innovation subcomponent, which will feature scouting for innovations and funding them through an innovation fund - in itself an innovative public-private partnership venture. The second innovation is the rural microenterprise promotion investment fund, which will support the emergence of innovative microenterprises. Innovative business development services that the programme may experiment include risk funds to cover business development service providers; trade credit supplied by wholesalers; the use of collateral management and inventory securitization; transactions supported by third parties; and use of "lead firms" for commodity chain development.