Project ID: 1131
Executive Board Document: EB-2005-84-R-11-Rev-1

Northern Regions Investment and Rural Development Programme

The programme's target group includes poor rural communities in two of the three northern regions of Mali - Tombouctou and Gao - which are amongst the poorest in the country. The programme will focus on 14 rural communities along the Niger River and will also include conflict-prevention activities in five other communities. Beneficiaries will be: small producers with limited livelihood owing to scarce financial and technical resources; nomadic herdsmen affected by environmental degradation and diminishing water resources; rural women with limited access to productive inputs; rural young people who lack training and control over resources; and marginalized groups such as peasants with limited access to land, destitute herders, and households that are short of labour.

Despite their productive potential, communities in northern Mali are the poorest in the country. Poverty in the northern regions is characterized by environmental degradation, lack of infrastructure and chronic food deficits. The conflicts in the north that occurred during the 1990s have also led to insecurity, which perpetuates chronic poverty. The rural poor are especially vulnerable to the fragile environment; many are food insecure. With few assets or access to physical or financial resources, they depend on income-generating activities with low productivity. In addition, they have limited access to basic social services, primary health care, safe water, useable roads, electricity and communication services.

This programme will support the Government's efforts to address rural poverty in the northern regions of Mali by empowering the most vulnerable groups to participate effectively in development activities. This programme aims to support the rural poor through: capacity-building of decentralized administrations and beneficiary groups to identify, plan and implement activities targeted at the rural poor; financing of social and productive investments will be provided. The programme will build on Mali's decentralized administrative system and partnerships between donors, NGOs, community-based organizations, and other agencies to promote pro-poor rural development, as proposed in the poverty reduction strategy paper for Mali.

Loan Amount

Loan: SDR 9.55 million (equivalent to approximately USD 14.6 million) Grant: SDR 530 000 (equivalent to approximately USD 803 000)

Total programme cost:USD 33.6 million

Cooperating Institution:

West African Development Bank

Project ID: 1089
Executive Board Document: EB-98-65-R-13-Rev-1

Sahelian Areas Development Fund Programme

The main objec tives of this ten-year IFAD-initiated programme, are to:

(i) improve food security and income at the household level;

(ii) increase the standard of living and well-being of rural households; and

(iii) initiate and support a self-sustainable participatory rural development process.

To achieve these objectives, a mechanism will be established to respond to the demand of rural communities for external support of their initiatives, i.e., development of infrastructure for financial services, agricultural production and marketing, and social services. Initially, six districts (or 81 communes) in the two regions of S gou and Koulikoro (170 000 households) will be covered, but the programme is designed to allow the eligibility and inclusion of all poor villages located in the Sahelian Belt of Mali in due course. In the six selected districts, slightly over half of the villages, which are not p resently benefiting from ongoing projects and programmes or are not located in the rich agricultural areas of the regions, will be served on a priority basis. The total number of b e n e fic i a ry households will be about 71 200 (or 498 400 persons). The great majority (70%) of these were classified as poor in 1994 (annual expenditure estimated at USD 154 per capita, at 1994 post-devaluation exchange rate of USD 1.00 = FCFA 500), with about half of them classified as very poor (USD 79 per capita).

Innovative Features:

This will be the first programme to adopt the new Flexible Lending Mechanism approved by the Executive Board in September 1998. As a consequence, other novel features of the programme are that: the Government will delegate responsibility for implementation to one national and several regional associations, recently constituted under private law; stakeholders are in the majority in each of the general assemblies and will thus be involved in programme management; and implementation is sufficiently flexible to be able to respond to positive shifts in effective demand .

Loan amount:

SDR 15.7 million (approximately USD 22.0 million) on highly concessional terms.

Total programme costs:

Estimated at USD 46.0 million, of which USD 6.4 million will be provided by the Government, USD 3.5 million by the beneficiaries, and USD 14.1 million by cofinanciers to be determined during the course of implementation.

Cooperating institution:

The project will be supervised directly by IFAD.