المعرفة

For the first time, the three Rome-based agencies of the United Nations have joined forces to raise awareness on the importance of food losses and to stimulate change and action in member countries to reduce them.

FAO, IFAD and WFP welcome this global commitment to end poverty, hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Our proposal on how to achieve zero hunger by 2030 is in the context of the proposed Sustainable Development Goal to eliminate hunger and malnutrition by 2030, which, in turn, goes hand-in-hand with the proposed Sustainable Development Goal 1 to eliminate poverty at the same time. With almost 800 million people suffering from hunger and almost four-fifths of the extreme poor living in rural areas, it is necessary to raise agricultural and rural incomes to achieve those two priority Sustainable Development Goals.

Access to modern renewable energy services is a key factor in eradicating poverty and ensuring food security.

Learn about IFAD's work and results in the 2014 Annual Report. This includes stories about the rural people we invest in, and covers our advocacy to keep the needs of rural communities at the top of the international development agenda. The Report also provides the facts and figures we regularly share with our Member States and partners.

With the mounting awareness of the unmet demand for youth financial services and the growing evidence that serving young people is viable, there is also a need to assess and document the implications for rural areas. This toolkit on Youth Access to Rural Finance aims to contribute to filling that gap.
The Lessons Learned and How To Do Note on this topic provide IFAD country programme managers, project design teams and implementing partners with insights and key guidance on designing and offering appropriate financial services for rural youth. The toolkit on Youth Access to Rural Finance synthesizes best practices and offers examples from around the world.  

Although there have been improvements in YFS access, youth are still lagging significantly behind adults in being able to access financial tools. Across high- and low-income countries, young people are less likely than adults to have a formal account. There are even starker differences related to a country’s income level, with 21 per cent of youth in low-income economies having a formal account compared with 61 per cent in upper-middle-income economies (Demirguc-Kunt et al., 2013). 

Even with this data, determining the exact extent of youth access to financial services can be complicated because there is a lack of consistent data and definitions on youth (see Box 3). The lack of data is more limited for rural areas.
While there is some analysis of the urban-rural gap in access to financial services, with those living in cities significantly more likely to have an account than rural residents (Klapper, 2012), there are currently no comprehensive studies with disaggregated data for rural youth.

In 1977, IFAD made improving “the nutritional level of the poorest populations in developing countries” one of the principal objectives of its founding agreement. Since then, governments, civil society and development organizations also have come to recognize the central importance of nutrition – which comprises undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and overweight – to development.

 

Since its inception in December 2013, PARM has worked for a better management of risks in agriculture in developing countries, considered as a main constraint to improve farmers’ livelihoods. 

​IFAD’s mission is to invest in rural people, with the objective of overcoming poverty. Young people have increasingly become a priority target for IFAD as part of the agency’s fight against rural poverty (IFAD, 2014a).

Climate change is exacerbating natural resource degradation and reducing the potential of productive lands. For example, rural farmers have to contend with climate shocks such as drought, rainfall deficits, floods and locust invasions. These shocks are reducing yields and making the cropping seasons hard to predict for traditional farmers. Traditional resilience strategies are no longer as effective as they were and the lean season is becoming more challenging to smallholder farmers.