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Ce document présente les résultats d’une étude portant sur le Programme de Microfinance Rural (PMR) au Mali. Il analyse les effets du Programme en termes de capacité d’action et d’utilisation des ressources dans les ménages, plus particulièrement sous l’angle du genre.

Ce document introduit deux critères pour définir et évaluer la ruralité: l’indice de ruralité relative et la contiguïté de zones de densité similaire. 

Ce rapport sert de guide pour orienter les investissements réalisés par le FIDA et d’autres donateurs internationaux en faveur des actions d’atténuation des changements climatiques en Afrique orientale et australe.

Cette étude présente les conclusions d’un examen de la littérature spécialisée et les principaux facteurs de surpoids et d’obésité, en les mettant en regard avec les systèmes alimentaires et en donnant des exemples tirés de la situation dans cinq pays.

Ces quarante dernières années, la Chine a connu une transformation rurale rapide, qui s’est accompagnée d’une hausse des revenus des ménages ruraux et d’une baisse de la pauvreté rurale. Ce document étudie la transformation rurale qui a touché les provinces du pays et ses principales conséquences.

Cet article nous renseigne sur les variables climatiques à recueillir, et sur les sources à consulter pour les obtenir, lors de l’élaboration d’une évaluation de l’impact.

Cet article porte notamment sur les activités visant à améliorer la gestion des pâturages, les sources d’alimentation animale complémentaires et le développement de la filière de l’élevage.

Les auteurs de cette étude élaborent une stratégie méthodologique pour tenir compte des conditions météorologiques et des conditions climatiques à long terme dans le cadre des évaluations de l’impact, en s’appuyant sur un projet de stockage des céréales exécuté au Tchad et soutenu par le FIDA.

Cet article propose un cadre méthodologique pour intégrer les conditions météorologiques actuelles et les tendances climatiques à long terme dans les études d’impact.

Le défi actuel de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques et des efforts de renforcement de la résilience est de passer à un processus qui contribue à améliorer, et non à menacer, les moyens d’existence.

Les auteurs de cet article présentent le rôle des animaux d’élevage dans les systèmes alimentaires circulaires des régions tropicales avec quatre études de cas.

Les auteurs de ce rapport étudient les tendances passées et explorent les trajectoires futures possibles de l’agriculture à petite échelle afin de déterminer le profil des agriculteurs de demain.

Grâce à une analyse des systèmes alimentaires, les auteurs de cette étude examinent les données existantes et déterminent les conditions, les groupes de population rurale et les délais nécessaires pour parvenir aux résultats visés.

Les auteurs de cette étude explorent le rôle de l’eau dans le système alimentaire égyptien et le dilemme auquel fait face le pays: améliorer l’autosuffisance alimentaire en allouant une part des ressources en eau douce du Nil à la production alimentaire ou dépendre des importations alimentaires de régions du monde où l’eau est disponible en abondance.

Cet article montre que les interventions à court et moyen termes sont les plus efficaces pour améliorer les moyens d’existence des agriculteurs pauvres, notamment leur sécurité alimentaire et leur santé, l’emploi hors exploitation et l’assistance sociale.

Les auteurs de cette étude se penchent sur les critères et les mécanismes de certification de deux produits d’exportation — les bananes et le cacao — en s’appuyant sur une analyse des systèmes alimentaires.

Les auteurs étudient ici la place de plus en plus prépondérante qu’occupent les PME dans la transformation des systèmes alimentaires, les faisant passer d’une structure traditionnelle, à une phase de transition jusqu’à une structure moderne.

Pour bâtir des filières alimentaires compétitives et inclusives, un pays doit se doter de politiques macroéconomiques à même d’améliorer l’environnement économique du secteur agricole et de créer des débouchés extérieurs, ainsi que de mesures ciblées propres à ce secteur afin de promouvoir la participation des petits exploitants aux filières compétitives en réduisant les coûts d’accès aux marchés.

Cette étude explore la manière dont la transformation traditionnelle des aliments fermentés peut être pratiquée à plus grande échelle, tout en améliorant les propriétés fonctionnelles des produits et en renforçant les filières locales.

Les auteurs de cette étude avancent que la transformation des systèmes alimentaires devrait tenir compte des régimes alimentaires en s’appuyant sur des données relatives à l'alimentation, aux tendances en la matière, aux motivations des consommateurs et aux caractéristiques de l’environnement alimentaire.

Cette étude s’intéresse aux liens entre l’autonomisation des femmes, les systèmes alimentaires et la nutrition.

Ce document fournit un cadre d'évaluation de la dynamique du bien-être en zones rurales et de l'évolution des systèmes alimentaires.

Cet article s’intéresse à la façon dont les activités du système alimentaire influent sur les changements climatiques et à l’effet de la modification des habitudes alimentaires sur les systèmes alimentaires. Il montre que les émissions provenant de la production alimentaire augmentent dans la plupart des régions, contrairement à celles liées au changement d’affectation des terres, qui baissent.

Cet article démontre que si la hausse prévue d’ici 2050 de la demande alimentaire peut être largement comblée à l’échelle régionale, l’éventuelle augmentation ou diversification des rendements ne garantira pas automatiquement l’inclusivité de la transformation rurale. L’urbanisation peut au contraire renforcer la pauvreté et les inégalités en milieu rural.

 

Si le rôle majeur joué par l’inclusion dans la transformation des systèmes alimentaires est de plus en plus compris, les recherches et discours récents sur le sujet sont insuffisants, et des mesures doivent être prises pour garantir que la transformation ne se fasse pas au détriment des populations rurales pauvres.

Cet article s’appuie sur des données portant sur 85 pays à faible revenu et à revenu intermédiaire pour présenter l’indice relatif aux systèmes alimentaires et analyser les liens entre systèmes alimentaires, transformation structurelle et rurale et répartition des populations.

Cet article étudie la possibilité de créer un indice relatif aux systèmes alimentaires (FSI) qui aurait vocation à refléter plusieurs éléments clés influençant les différences de performances des systèmes alimentaires à l’échelle nationale.

Cet article met l’accent sur cinq changements de paradigme indispensables pour dépasser les compromis et créer des synergies entre santé et nutrition, moyens d’existence inclusifs, viabilité environnementale et résilience des systèmes alimentaires.

We investigate how perceptions of physical water availability in the past are related to farmers’ current irrigation behaviour.

This analysis investigates the potential mechanism and the practical significance of the impacts of agricultural value chain development in a geographically challenging rural area of a developing country.

Stress-tolerant rice varieties (STRVs) are bred to be high yielding and tolerant to climate shocks such as drought. 

 In this paper, particular attention is given to the identification and promotion of productivity and resilience enhancing agricultural practices. 

Rice farmers in the mid-hills region of Nepal are vulnerable to drought, which can drastically reduce yields. Stress-tolerant rice varieties can mitigate this vulnerability, as can having a high seed replacement rate and using best management practices in rice cultivation.

This paper reviews the narrative on rural youth and economic opportunities in Africa, using a set of policy documents from various African countries and regional and international organizations. 

This study reviews the opportunities and challenges facing rural youth in the Near East, North Africa, Europe and Central Asia region.

This study offers a general picture of the situation of rural youth in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

This study characterizes the structural and rural transformation of the Asia and the Pacific region.

This study presents a framework to analyse the political economy of rural youth policy and institutions’ opportunity space with a quadrant that measures the extent to which rural youth are a priority in policies and institutions versus the extent that governments have to effectively implement rural youth policies.

This study analyses how migrants positively contribute to the sustainable economic development of rural youth in their countries of origin.

This study takes a unique look at the determinants of youth migration across seven different countries using recently collected data.

While conflicts are often defined as “development in reverse”, there is a general lack of research focusing specifically on young people living in rural areas. 

This study examines the intersections between youth access to land, migration decisions and employment opportunities in various African countries.

This analysis reviews existing research on the impact of digital initiatives on youth in the education, agriculture, financial and employment sectors.

This study analyses inclusive finance and rural youth through cutting-age research with new insights and approaches that have emerged over the years in the field. 

In this study, we show that rural transformation processes are associated with improvements in rural youth nutrition – malnutrition and underweight – in nearly all regions, although the pace of change varies considerably across countries.

Climate change matters for all young people, especially for those whose livelihoods depend on agriculture. This study shows that adaptation to climate change is feasible and options increase as new technologies and management approaches come on-stream. 

Research on rural youth aspirations suggests that many young people are not averse to agriculture as such, but to agriculture’s current neglected condition

This study is motivated by the consistent portrayal of agriculture and the broader rural economy in Africa as domains of opportunity for rural youth. 

A key lesson is that lack of technical skills does not seem to be the biggest obstacle youth face in entering the labour force. Evidence on agricultural extension programmes suggests that peer-to-peer learning works best.

This exploratory study focuses on participation in decision-making processes and how rural youth could benefit from its findings in development projects and initiatives. 

This study analyses sex-disaggregated data from various countries to characterize rural youths’ transition to adulthood by gender. 

Little is known about the economic activities of rural youth. This study provides empirical evidence on this gap in literature. 

This study uses the concept of the Rural Opportunity Space from economic geography literature to shed light on these questions. 

Building on United Nations data, this study analyses how past growth of the youth population was dramatic in Asia and the Pacific, while projections suggest a sharp rise in the youth population of sub-Saharan Africa until 2050.  

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.

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

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.

Cette étude examine les dynamiques de l'emploi dans l'agriculture en Tanzanie et au Malawi. 

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. 

Cette étude fait le bilan de l'impact sur la pauvreté et le niveau de vie de la recherche dans le domaine agricole, en passant en revue de manière systématique les évaluations d'impact (expérimentales ou quasi expérimentales) des variétés améliorées distribuées par le GCRAI entre 2007 et 2015. 

Ce document a pour but d'aider à comprendre le contexte dans lequel travaillent les petits exploitants.

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. 

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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 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?

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.

This paper challenges current thinking on the connection between rural transformation and food security & nutrition. It advocates that improving rural and structural transformation has a positive cyclical effect upon communities by improving food availability, access, supplies and utilization which in turn improves the health and education of communities. 

Using evidence from across the developing world, the paper creates a policy agenda to maximise potential for smallholder farming to transform local economies.

This paper examines the role of rural-urban linkages in fostering inclusive and sustainable food systems and how these contribute to rural transformation and,  more broadly, to sustainable and inclusive development. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, the paper analyses the interdependencies between rural and urban areas and points to the key roles played by rural-based populations and producers, particularly smallholders, in promoting inclusive, mutually beneficial and sustainable urbanization. 

This paper investigates how household agricultural involvement affects food consumption and dietary diversity in rural Malawi. It analyses the relationship between on-farm income shares and the caloric consumption levels and shares across food groups. It finds that while food consumption and dietary diversity increase with agricultural involvement, the quality of diets does not improve. It highlights the importance of income diversification to dietary diversity and the need for investments in nutrition-sensitive agricultural value chains, nutrition education and crop diversification programmes. 

This paper looks at the role of agriculture in fostering inclusive and sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It discusses how improving agricultural productivity, smallholder access to markets and expanding agribusiness opportunities can accelerate transformation, investment and industrialization. The paper presents key investment and policy elements to be considered and points to the centrality of smallholders for the rural transformation process to be inclusive.

This paper analyses the role of migration in promoting rural livelihoods and discusses how migration interacts with transformative economic processes. Focusing on migration out of rural areas, it examines the impacts of migration on rural livelihoods and challenges the perspective that sees rural outmigration as a failure of rural development. 

This paper is a guide to current debates about agricultural development. It analyses the changes in development approaches and thinking in recent decades and explores today's critical issues in agricultural and rural development policy. With the main focus on Africa, the paper also includes insights from Asia and Latin America.