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| Project ID: 1276
Rural Small and Microenterprise Project Phase II The project objectives are to: (i) promote the development of viable small microenterprises (SMEs) and their professional organizations so that they can respond to the needs of the target group; (ii) improve the performance and productivity of SMEs through access to sustainable non-financial services (e.g., training); (iii) promote the use of appropriate technology, the observance of acceptable quality standards and better access to markets; (iv) enhance access to financial services adapted to the requirements of SMEs; and (v) improve the institutional and legal framework of SMEs. Project support activities, including credit, will be tailored to suit the different operational categories (subsistence, emerging and expanding SMEs). In the case of new entrants and subsistence SMEs for example, apprenticeship programmes will be used to facilitate skill transfer from experienced established entrepreneurs to new entrepreneurs. Loan Amount: SDR 10.65 million (approximately USD 14.9 million) on highly concessional terms Total project cost: estimated at USD 17.6 million, of which national Government will provide about USD 2.7 million. Cooperating Institution: UNOPS 
Project ID: 1232
Smallholder Cash and Export Crops Development Project Who are the beneficiaries? The intended beneficiaries of the Smallholder Cash and Export Crops Development Project are about 28 000 cash crop producer families in selected rural districts of four Rwanda provinces. They are all very poor people who live below the poverty line and work small plots or produce cash crops to supplement staple production and thus achieve basic food security. Why are they poor? Cash crops make a significant contribution to smallholder households in Rwanda inasmuch as they are often their major source of cash income. However, the smallholder coffee growers receive extremely poor returns on their production owing to inadequate processing facilities, which makes it difficult to control the quality of their output, and very low prices on the international coffee market. Remunerative prices can be obtained only in the event the quality of the coffee improves significantly and innovative marketing strategies are adopted. Smallholder tea producers receive only a fraction of the price paid in neighbouring countries, despite the fact that the quality of the green tea leaves produced in Rwanda is among the best in world. What will the project do for them? The project will assist smallholder coffee growers to establish primary cooperative societies and produce high-quality arabica coffee. It will also support the development of modern coffee processing facilities by cooperative companies, which, over time, will be taken over by primary cooperative societies of poor smallholder growers. With respect to tea, the project will help to privatize a large government industrial estate by sharing it out among 4 000 poor smallholders, of whom about 2 000 will be women heads of households; establish and train primary cooperative societies formed by beneficiaries of the land distribution; and finance the construction of a factory to process the tea produced by them. Here again, in the course of time, the new tea factory will be taken over by primary societies of smallholder tea producers. The involvement of the Fair Trade (FT) organization, Twin Trading Ltd. (TWIN) in project implementation will provide the cooperative companies with training, information, management support and access to special FT market niches that reward production of high-quality arabica coffee and tea at remunerative prices. TWIN assistance will continue after project completion to ensure the sustainability of production and marketing activities funded by it. It is estimated that the processing cooperative companies will be in a position to increase the prices paid to growers for raw crops by 100% for tea and 30% for coffee, once the companies have fully reimbursed the resources received under the project to finance the industrial facilities. How will the beneficiaries participate in the project? Individual beneficiaries of the distribution of the tea estate will be entitled to use plots of public land planted to tea, subject to sustained good management of the plots received. All members of the coffee and tea growers’ primary cooperatives holding shares in the processing enterprises will participate in managing them. Membership in primary societies will be voluntary but subject to conditions regarding the democratic nature of the societies and commitment to producing top-quality crops for processing. The introduction of new cash crop initiatives will depend on the demand of farmer group cooperatives or small and medium enterprises. Loan Amount: SDR 12.3 million (equivalent to approximately USD 16.26 million) at highly concessional terms Total project cost: USD 25.09 million Cooperating Institution: United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) |
| Project ID: 1222
Umutara Community Resource and Infrastructure Development Twin Project Like the UCRIDP, the twin project is expected to generate both tangible and non-tangible benefits. The most important project benefit better governance would be non-tangible. Together, the institutional development activities and the project approach will establish new organization cultures (in terms of efficiency in service provision, transparency and accountability) in the public administration at all levels and among the people as well. This will bring about a closer relationship between people and the public administration, and provide the public administration with the means and new working methods to go about its tasks. The implementation of the new project will unify approaches and resource availability throughout the province, providing evidence of support to the Governments decentralization policy that might be replicated elsewhere in the country on a provincial basis. Tangible benefits will accrue to people in the form of improved water supply for domestic and animal use, better access to markets, good quality, improved seed, a more effective process of technology generation and transfer based on participatory diagnosis of farmers problems, improved animal health services, a network of sustainable local microfinance organizations, and credit for small- and medium-size enterprises that create direct and indirect employment opportunities for the target group. The intended beneficiaries of the Umutara Community Resource and Infrastructure Development Twin Project are 35 000 families living in three districts and the municipality of Mutara in Umutara Province who are not covered by the ongoing Umutara Community Resource and Infrastructure Development Project (UCRIDP) funded by IFAD and the OPEC Fund. The target group comprises all the poor people living at the poverty threshold or well below the poverty line in the project areas, for a total of about 40 000 households. Vulnerable, very poor households account for about 7 000 of the total project households. The core of the project consists of a system of bottom-up planning and implementation, a corresponding system of service delivery and a participatory evaluation of the services provided. Service providers, including all public agencies, will operate under renewable contractual arrangements, with renewal subject to satisfactory performance as determined by the end-users. Like the UCRIDP, the twin project will respond to effective demand from the communities, as evidenced by their willingness to contribute their share of the cost of the activities they wish to undertake, with the project providing matching grants in support of such activities. Loan amount: SDR 9.4 million (equivalent to approximately USD 12.0 million) on highly concessional terms Total programme costs are estimated at USD 24.2 million Cooperating Institution: United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) |
| Project ID: 1149
Umutara Community Resource and Infrastructure Development Project The overall objective of this ten-year IFAD-initiated project is to improve governance in a region of Rwanda previously deprived of all basic economic and social infrastructures, and where the natural resour ce base has been disrupted by the recent settlement of a large number of returnees. The project design emphasizes institutional development and capacity-building, strengthening of the base level of public administration, support to self-reliant groups of agricultural producers and women, client participation in community development planning and microproject implementation, and mechanisms to ensure that all agents supplying services to the communities are held accountable to the users for the quality of services received. The specific objectives of the project are to: (i) establish mechanisms to enhance community control of the development process; (ii) provide clean water supplies and build roads to open access to/from isolated communities; (iii) increase household food security by boosting agricultural productivity through the introduction of improved seed, fruit-tree species, soil-conservation measures, mineral fertilizers and other soil treatments; (iv) reduce reliance on natural fuel wood supplies by introducing household woodlots, agroforestry and communal plantations; and (v) promote civil-society organizations to implement community-based and community-driven development and build a foundation for future rural financial services based on savings mobilization. Innovative features: The Umutara project is centred on an innovative approach to project organization and management based on grass-roots institutional development. Specifically, the project aims to introduce cultural changes in the relationship between public administration and peoples organizations so that community-based organizations and farmers and womens groups can play a leading role in development action and national natural-resource conservation. Loan amount: SDR 11.9 million (approximately USD 15.9 million) on highly concessional terms under the FLM. Total project costs: Estimated at USD 32.9 million, of which USD 9.8 million will be pr ovided by the OPEC Development Fund, USD 2.3 million by NGOs, USD 3.2 million by the Government and USD 1.6 million by the beneficiaries. Cooperating institution: UNOPS. |
