المعرفة

The objective of the IFAD Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF) is to strengthen indigenous peoples’ communities and their organizations by financing small projects that foster their self-driven development in the framework of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and to generate lessons learned and approaches for replication and up-scaling.

The Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF)1 finances small projects designed and implemented directly by indigenous peoples’ communities and their organizations. The projects are selected through global calls for proposals, based on a competitive process. In managing the IPAF when it was established in 2007, IFAD realized that the Facility was not only a grant-making mechanism, but it also contained a wealth of knowledge derived from the project proposals themselves. With its limited funding, the IPAF can support only a small number of these proposals. Thus, a knowledge-harvesting mechanism was set up with funding from the Initiative for Mainstreaming Innovation (IMI). 

Equitable access to land and tenure security for IFAD’s target groups are essential for rural development and poverty eradication. Tenure security influences the extent to which farmers are prepared to invest in improvements in production and land management. 

Interventions to be scaled-up are in this note are: (i) Recognition and recording of multiple and sometimes overlapping rights in community-level land use, watershed management, territorial, rangeland and forest management planning processes; (ii) Registration of land ownership and use rights; (iii) Equitable land access; (iv) Land conflict resolution and access to judiciary and legal aid and; (v) Civic education and public awareness-raising.