السلاسل

Development projects that integrate investments in rural indigenous people, youth and women with measures to adapt to climate change are more likely to be successful in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a new report launched today by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

A new report from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) shows that by working with women, men, young people and indigenous peoples as change agents we are best placed to beat back the impact of climate change on rural communities in West and Central Africa (WCA).

This report presents selected achievements and lessons from the growing portfolio of fisheries and aquaculture investments supported by IFAD.

This How-to-do Note is a practical step by step operational guidance on mainstreaming nutrition in IFAD-supported country strategies and investment projects for use by IFAD staff, consultants and partners.

This is the first study to quantify the general equilibrium impacts of introducing a new cash crop into a poor isolated economy, including impacts on environmentally sensitive fishing activities.

Around one third of the food globally produced is estimated to be lost or wasted along the supply chain. These losses affect disproportionally developing countries.

There are different views around the future of smallholder agriculture and its potential to contribute to the needed transformations of agriculture and rural economies. 

The Coastal Community Development Project (CCDP), implemented between 2013 and 2017, was designed to reduce poverty and achieve sustainable economic growth in 12 coastal districts of Indonesia.

Agriculture and rural development research will play a critical role in meeting the ambitious targets under SDGs 1 and 2. 

This study is an analysis of what drives cofinancing in IFAD-supported programmes/projects, covering 20 years of data from 559 projects in 109 countries.

The Participatory Smallholder Agriculture and Artisanal Fisheries Development Programme (PAPAFPA) and the Smallholder Commercial Agriculture Project (PAPAC) are complementary projects designed to improve the livelihoods of smallholders in Sao Tomé and Príncipe. PAPAFPA, which has now closed, created farmers’ cooperatives to improve the development of organic cacao, coffee, and pepper value chains through increased commercialization in domestic and niche export markets.

This analysis examines the dynamics of youth employment in agriculture and the agri-food system in Tanzania and Malawi.

Farmers in southwestern Bangladesh, an area prone to natural disasters, are sometimes unable to reach community markets in the monsoon season. 

From 2011 to 2016, the Plan VIDA project in Bolivia was implemented to address extreme poverty in rural areas by increasing the incomes and assets of rural people in the departments of Potosí and Cochabamba of the Plurinational State of Bolivia

This study estimates the mitigation potential of agricultural practices supported by IFAD’s current investments in order to provide guidance for the design of future investments. 

This paper considers the relationship between farm size and productivity patterns across countries and within countries. 

يقدم هذا الإصدار ويحلّل التجارب من البرامج والمشاريع التالية التي يمولها الصندوق:

Despite decades of research and development of technologies and innovations which improve farming practices and productivity, small farmers in Tanzania continue to use technologies and practices which do not favour high yields and economic returns. 

تبحث هذه الورقة تأثير البحوث الزراعية على الفقر والرفاهية من خلال إجراء عرض منهجي لتقييمات التأثيرات التجريبية وشبه التجريبية للأنواع المُطوّرَة التي نشرها الجماعة الاستشارية للبحوث الزراعية الدولية بين عامي 2007 و2015

The Guangxi Integrated Agricultural Development Project (GIADP) was implemented in 623 Administrative Villages in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China to increase income of smallholder farmers by developing community infrastructures

The Rural Development Support Programme in Guéra (PADER-G) was implemented to improve the food security and livelihoods of farmers living in remote areas of Guéra, a drought-prone and conflict-ridden region of Chad. 

The Project for Rural Income through Exports in Rwanda, known by its acronym PRICE, aims to increase returns to farmers through the development of export-driven value chains for coffee, tea, sericulture and horticulture.

The Irrigated Rice Production Enhancement Project (IRPEP) was implemented between 2010 and 2015 to improve the rice productivity and livelihoods of smallholder farmers who cultivate on Communal Irrigation Schemes in three regions (Western Visayas, Central Visayas and Northern Mindanao) of the Philippines. 

The High-Value Agriculture Project in Hill and Mountain Areas (HVAP) integrated farmers living in the remote hill and mountain areas of Mid-Western Nepal into the local economy of goats and high-valued crops such as apples and Sichuan pepper (timur). 

Deforestation and unsustainable management practices have had a significant impact on the livelihoods of poor rural communities in the forest areas of Campeche, Chiapas and Oaxaca states in Mexico. 

In Khatlon Oblast, the poorest region of Tajikistan, decades of overgrazing has degraded pastoral land leading to low milk and meat  production, food insecurity and malnutrition in rural areas.

Rural people in the Ethiopian highlands depend mainly on rain-fed subsistence farming for their livelihoods.

The Agricultural Value Chains Support Project (PAFA) aimed to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Senegal’s Groundnut Basin. 

يهدف هذا البحث إلى بلورة فهم أفضل للسياق الذي تعمل فيه مزارع أصحاب الحيازات الصغيرة. 

سيُشكِّل الشباب في عام 2030 حوالي 15 في المائة من سكان العالم، وستبلغ نسبة شباب الريف 6 في المائة تقريباً. ومن المتوقع أن تشهد بعض الأقاليم ”طفرة شبابية“ أو زيادة كبيرة في عدد الشباب.

Investments in irrigation systems have been shown to substantially improve farmers’ productivity, and thus alleviate poverty. This study provides an example of such an investment: the Participatory Small-Scale Irrigation Development Programme. 

سلاسل القيمة المراعية للتغذية: تم إعداد دليل لتصميم المشروعات لسد الفجوة المعرفية الرئيسية في مجال سلاسل القيمة الناشئة للتغذية من خلال توفير التوجيه حول كيفية تصميم مشاريع سلاسل القيمة المراعية للتغذية، مع التركيز على المنتجين أصحاب الحيازات الصغيرة.

This paper addresses an important gap regarding the systematic knowledge and evidence on how value chains can contribute to nutrition, while remaining financially viable and inclusive of smallholder farmers. 

This paper explores the conditions for collective action to generate inclusion when agriculture transforms. 

This study estimates the impact of agricultural research, specifically improved maize seeds varieties, on agricultural productivity and welfare in Uganda using a three-wave panel survey. 

This report reflects IFAD’s ongoing efforts to generate evidence to inform decision-making at the corporate and project level.

This paper uses the available cross-country data to analyse the causes for the increase in the disparity between rural and urban areas in Asia. 

​In 2014, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) released a report celebrating achievements through its partnership with the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Since then, the world has been responding to critical environmental and climate challenges.

​With private contributions becoming increasingly pivotal to global climate finance, it is evident that scaling up and channeling private capital is crucial in meeting the goal of achieving the Paris Agreement and limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

Pastoralism is a way of life based on territorial mobility, adopted in response to the challenges faced by human communities living in harsh or difficult environments.

Policy engagement is a difficult activity to accurately monitor and evaluate, particularly when development agencies are interested in attributing impact to their efforts. 

The toolkit focuses on end-user finance for renewable energy technologies for rural households, smallholder farmers, and rural micro, small and medium enterprises.

This paper aims to identify the main drivers of poverty reduction in Malawi. Using an augmented poverty decomposition methodology, it explores in what way the different farm and non-farm economic activities contribute to poverty reduction and income growth. 

This paper aims to explore the influence of nutrition-sensitive interventions on dietary profiles of the beneficiaries of IFAD-funded projects.

This paper analyses the channels through which growth reduces poverty by evaluating the relationship between the sectoral composition of economic growth and the rural-urban composition of poverty. 

This paper analyses the relation between urbanization and poverty reduction, by exploring the role of secondary towns, mega cities and rural non-agricultural sector in relation to poverty reduction.

Agriculture begins with seed. Without seed, there can be no crops and no food production. When harvests fail or seed stocks are lost, seed insecurity ensues, which can reduce food security and livelihoods. 

This paper challenges the traditional view that portrays income maximization as the main driver of migration and tests whether relative deprivation and social inequality lead to migration in sub-Saharan Africa. Examining data from the Living Standards Measurements Study – Integrated Surveys in Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) from Tanzania, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda, the paper finds that a household’s migration decision is based not only on its well-being status, but also on the position of the household relative to the wealth distribution in the local community. Results indicate that relative deprivation of wealth was positively associated with migration, implying a need to renew the discussion of relative deprivation and social inequality as a cause of migration in sub-Saharan Africa.

Among ecosystems services, freshwater is one of the most fundamental for life. For smallholders, water means the difference between a decent life and poverty, hunger and malnutrition. 

This How to Do Note (HTDN) is intended to provide guidance on how to design smallholder agriculture adaptation programmes that consider the differential impacts of climate change on women, men and youth smallholder farmers. This includes recognizing that programme interventions – from design to staffing to capacity development of beneficiaries and local organizations – need to consider how gender will affect sustainability and impact. The experiences, social positions and differing access to resources of marginalized populations are fundamental considerations in the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation of gender transformative smallholder agriculture adaptation programmes.

This paper examines the transformation and diversification of the rural economy in Asia, focusing on the role and importance of the rural non-farm economy and employment in economic transformation and related diversification of employment and income opportunities for rural communities.

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) can be a useful tool to measure the empowerment, agency and inclusion of women in the agriculture sector. However, computing the WEAI in its current form involves large data requirements, resulting in lengthy surveys with several questions on various dimensions and indicators within each dimension. This paper proposes a reduced version of the WEAI, or the R-WEAI, and examines two possible approaches to reduce the data requirements while ensuring comparability to the full WEAI.

Agriculture and fisheries, the backbone of food security and nutrition for coastal communities and globally, are under threat. 

Cash transfer and agricultural support programmes are both used to improve nutrition outcomes in developing countries. This paper examines previous reviews of the impact of these programmes and compares the evidence between the two. The paper finds that, although there are about the same number of programmes of each type, many more papers have been written about the cash transfer programmes than the agricultural programmes. While evidence suggests that both programme types improved the quality of food consumption, the paper concludes that both types show weak evidence of improvements in anthropometric outcomes.

The Smallholder Dairy Commercialization Programme (SDCP) aimed to foster market-driven development of the informal dairy sector in Kenya. 

In Madagascar, the Project to Support Development in the Menabe and Melaky Regions (AD2M) aimed to improve the livelihoods of poor farmers by strengthening their tenure security and access to well-functioning irrigation systems.

This study describes the shifting age and sex patterns of populations across rural and urban sectors in sub‑Saharan Africa from 1980 to 2015. It examines the relationship between the slowdown in urbanization and rural and urban age structure gaps, sex composition and dependency ratios. Findings show that rural-urban migration of young adults plays a key role in explaining dependency ratios and sex compositional gaps in rural and urban areas. Results also highlight the value of taking into account local age and sex structures to better prepare for the demographic dividend and other consequences of demographic shifts in sub-Saharan Africa.

Climate change and malnutrition are among the greatest problems in the twentyfirst century; they are “wicked problems”, difficult to describe, with multiple causes, and no single solution.

This issue presents and analyses experiences from the following IFAD-funded projects and programmes:
Ethiopia: Pastoral Community Development Project; Nepal: Leasehold Forestry and Livestock Programme; Palestine: Participatory Natural Resource Management Programme; Peru: Project for Strengthening Assets, Markets and Rural Development in the Northern Highlands (Sierra Norte); Sierra Leone: Rehabilitation and Community-based Poverty Reduction Project

This paper describes the Participatory Impact Assessment and Learning Approach (PIALA) which was developed and piloted by IFAD. The approach aims to produce rigorous qualitative and quantitative evidence that can be used not only to identify and assess the impacts of development projects, but also to promote learning and improved understanding of the associated processes and pathways of socio-economic change. Illustrated with cases from Viet Nam and Ghana, the paper assesses the value of the approach for collaborative learning and reporting for IFAD’s country programming and global policy engagement, as well as for the wider development community.

Remittances have increased in low-income and lower- middle-income countries in recent years, playing an important role as a stable source of finance at the macro-level, and in poverty reduction at the micro-level. 

Drawing on a critical review of the literature and econometric analyses based on cross-country panel data, this study examines the relationships among remittances, growth and poverty reduction in Asia and the Pacific and highlights policy implications to be considered by governments and policy-makers.

This paper investigates the trends and the influencing factors of IFAD’s project disbursement performance over the past 20 years. Based on data from 577 projects in 111 countries, the study finds that disbursement of funds are often delayed and time-consuming.

Using econometric analysis, the study assesses the internal and external factors affecting the amount and timeliness of disbursements, and provides important lessons on how international financial institutions such as IFAD can better monitor and manage this important aspect of their development effectiveness. 

This toolkit explains how to identify and address the diverse needs, constraints and opportunities of poor rural people through IFAD-supported projects and policy engagement.

Graduation out of chronic poverty has recently been receiving considerable attention by the global development community for its potential synergies with social protection, microfinance and livelihoods development approaches to poverty reduction. 

This paper examines the evidence regarding the effectiveness of graduation strategies in reducing extreme poverty, with a focus on rural households, and proposes a new analytical framework to support future work on graduation as a learning and adaptation process in development practice.

Project Completion Reports (PCRs) are a critical tool for development organizations, both for accountability purposes, and as a means of learning from project experience to inform the design of future operations. This paper analyses a sample of PCRs from IFAD to assess the extent to which evidence is used to determine a project's effectiveness in bringing about development. 

The report finds that most claims on results are not supported by evidence, and discusses implications for the objective measurement of development effectiveness.

This paper analyses how food safety challenges and requirements affect smallholder farmers' access to markets. High food safety standards in destination countries force governments of developing countries to make strategic choices about establishing domestic standards and upgrading the infrastructure and knowledge base of smallholder farmers.

The paper suggests mechanisms that can be used to respond to these challenges, to enable smallholder inclusion in different markets.

This issue presents and analyses experiences from the following IFAD-funded projects and programmes:

Brazil: Sustainable Development Project for Agrarian Reform; Settlements in the Semi-arid North-east (Dom Hélder Câmara Project);

China: South Gansu Poverty Reduction Programme;

Ghana: Rural Enterprises Programme; Morocco: Rural Development Project in the Mountain Zones of Al-Haouz Province; 

Uganda: Vegetable Oil Development Project.

This paper provides an overview of concepts, issues and research on the relationship between financial inclusion and inclusive rural transformation.

It demonstrates how changing demand for financial services, innovations in rural finance, and different investment strategies affect the interplay of supply and demand.

This paper analyses how different types of social protection interventions affect rural livelihoods. It examines how these interventions can help rural transformation by increasing productivity and asks how they can influence inclusiveness.

Using country-level evidence, it suggests that the effectiveness of social protection depends upon specific contexts and combinations of interventions, and asks what this means for building policy. 

This paper seeks to answer three main questions: (i) What are fragile states and situations and how do they relate to issues of inclusive
structural and rural transformation? (ii) In three selected case studies of diverse fragile situations (in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Haiti and the Republic of the Sudan – drawing on IFAD financed programme and country experience), what have been the key elements of structural and rural transformation and to what extent has rural transformation been inclusive? (iii) In these cases, how does fragility affect the inclusiveness of rural transformation? Which policies and approaches can successfully promote inclusive rural transformation in
fragile situations?

Conservation agriculture (CA) in sub-Saharan Africa has multiple, but often very specific, niches for investment that need to be understood to support its inclusion and implementation in projects.

​Smallholder farmers use different strategies to improve their market presence and to capture more value added in the agricultural sector. These strategies include the creation of cooperatives and other farmers’ organizations (FOs).

This paper examines the impact of IFAD-supported projects so as to learn lessons for future projects. It analyses the different methods used by IFAD to measure a project's impact, finds that IFAD is improving the well-being of rural people, and recommends that impact assessments be built into future projects from their inception.

​Biodiversity is about more than plants, animals, and micro-organisms and their ecosystems – the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992) recognizes that it is also very much about people and our need for food security, medicines, fresh air, shelter, and a clean and healthy environment. Biodiversity is also essential for the maintenance of ecosystem-based services, such as the provision of water and food for human, animal and plant life. When we make an effort to conserve biodiversity, we are helping to maintain critical global biological resources to meet our needs today as well as those of future generations. Biodiversity conservation is therefore central to achieving recent global commitments for sustainable development under “Agenda 2030”, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) recognizes that losing biodiversity means losing opportunities for coping with future challenges, such as those posed by climate change and food insecurity. 

​This report is aimed at readers who seek to build economic evidence in support of the inclusion of actions on agriculture in climate change plans and programmes, particularly at the national level under the umbrella of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the December 2015 Paris Agreement, which aims to restrict a rise in global temperatures and manage risks. Agriculture is a sector especially sensitive to climate change. It also accounts for significant emissions and is, therefore, a priority for both adaptation and mitigation plans and actions at global, national and local levels.