Rural Resilience Project

This project seeks to improve the well-being of the Republic of Moldova's poor rural population through strengthened resilience and enhanced economic opportunities. It expects to accomplish these aims by improving the population's skills for better integration into profitable value chains and by improving their access to climate-resilient infrastructure and microfinance services.

It is expected that increasing the competitiveness of agribusiness will generate rural employment and increase the resilience of low-income rural people while also broadening the Government's tax base, thus helping to finance its existing strategy for poverty reduction.

The project's activities are categorized into two core components:

1. Improving the capacities of smallholders and agribusinesses, enhancing their resilience and promoting investments in productive rural infrastructure and agrisystems.
2. Supporting agribusiness development through the establishment of the Moldova Credit Guarantee Fund for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as through other measures for promoting increased quantity and quality of production.

The project is intended to cover all the country's rural areas, with the aim of targeting climate-vulnerable farmers and agribusinesses and, more generally, the poorest segments of the rural society. The project will have about 44,145 direct beneficiaries through 17,658 households. Key target groups include semi-subsistence and commercially oriented smallholder farmers, young entrepreneurs and poor climate-vulnerable smallholder women farmers.