During the recent years IFAD has made efforts to consolidate existing and create new partnerships and to broaden its outreach. These have been the main pillars of IFAD’s resource strategy. While leverage of financial resources remains a central objective, importance is increasingly being attached to other types of resources such as human capital and work systems, information and knowledge, reputation and good will and, most importantly, working with others.

The Consultation to Review the Adequacy of the Resources Available to IFAD provided opportunities for working closely with donor partners to refine IFAD’s strategies and lending programmes for the coming years. At the same time, an emphasis has been placed on analysing donors’ aid priorities and trends; this increased focus on such issues is helping identify new openings for joint operations, project cofinancing and special activities financed from supplementary funds. The BSF.JP is such an operation; it is exclusively financed by the Belgian Survival Fund of the Government of Belgium, administered by IFAD, and involves UNFPA, WHO and the Popular Coalition. BSF.JP programmes focus on the neediest rural poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

In a drive for efficiency and cost-effectiveness, UN agencies and other development institutions are coming together to establish global targets - labelled, for the time being the Millennium and/or International Development Goals (MIDGS) - and examine ways to mesh their activities to ensure that these objectives are met. In this context, the IFAD-hosted Global Mechanism – the fund supporting the UN Convention to Combat Desertification – became fully operational in 1999, bringing together a wide coalition of interested parties to support investments in dryland areas.

Working with NGOs is one of the ways IFAD maintains its focus on the true needs of its clients in the field. NGOs are involved in implementing IFAD projects and receive support under the IFAD/NGO ECP grant programme. In addition, the sphere of IFAD/NGO collaboration has been expanded through the Popular Coalition to Eradicate Hunger and Poverty, a knowledge network on rural poverty issues.

Links with the corporate world continue to be fostered. Bringing the private sector into rural poverty-alleviation projects is a way of compensating for the widespread decline in official development assistance (ODA) going to agricultural development. Another link is identifying ways in which IFAD, as a international financial institution, can draw upon private capital markets to increase its lending resources.