Factsheets

Since 1980, IFAD has financed 13 rural development programmes and projects in Tunisia for a total cost of US$453 million, with an IFAD investment of US$194.6 million directly benefiting 125,850 rural households. 

Niger covers a landlocked 1,267,000 km² tract of the Sahel north of Nigeria. With a poverty rate of 48.9 per cent and income per capita of US$420, Niger is one of the world’s poorest nations. In 2015, it ranked last among 188 countries measured by the United Nations Human Development Index

The China-IFAD South-South and Triangular Cooperation Facility was established in February 2018 and is the first Facility in IFAD dedicated to SSTC.

The MilkIT research for development project set out to improve dairy-centred livelihoods in India and Tanzania through intensification of smallholder
production focused on enhancement of feeds and feeding using innovation platforms and value chain approaches.

The project worked in the state of Uttarakhand in India and in Morogoro and Tanga regions in Tanzania. In both countries dairy has considerable potential to improve the livelihoods and nutrition of poor farming families but this potential has been underexploited. MilkIT focused on improving milk productivity through multistakeholder engagement to increase milk marketing and dairy cow feeding.

In Argentina, IFAD helps reduce rural poverty by investing in smallholder farmer organisations and indigenous communities to increase their income. The country programme strategy (2016-2021) is based on national priorities and has three strategic objectives focusing on income and strategic opportunities; human and social capital; and institutional development.

The strategy emphasizes the central role farmer and community organizations play in rural transformation processes. Key activities include:
• bolstering the economic sustainability of families and organizations by improving and diversifying productive activities, building resilience, improving their negotiating power in value chains, and promoting good nutritional practices
• strengthening the capacity of poor rural people and organizations by improving their managerial capacity, socio-economic condition, and their ability to engage in dialogue with the public sector
• building the capacity of government institutions to support rural development.

IFAD has a unique mandate and unmatched experience working in remote areas where others don’t go, and where poverty is most entrenched. IFAD-supported projects work directly with the most marginalized and disadvantaged people.

They focus on rural women, youth and indigenous communities. Our loans and grants enable developing countries to increase food production, create jobs and protect resources.

With Fostering Agricultural Revitalization in Myanmar (FARM), the first project it has financed in Myanmar, IFAD is scaling up the best parts of regional and global projects, both its own and those of other organizations. For example, FARM has introduced a new method to complement pre-existing extension services.

This is benefiting both farmers and landless microentrepreneurs across the project area. At the heart of FARM’s innovation is the establishment of Knowledge Centres (KCs). Built on the structure and network of public extension services, the KCs are staffed by a ministry extension worker – the KC Manager. The KC Manager brings together farmers and microentrepreneurs in common interest groups, and helps them make the most of newly available extension services.

Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa experience losses equivalent to 30- 40 per cent of total yields due to pests that attack their crops.

They need help to diagnose the problem and identify practical, economic, feasible and environmentally safe measures to deal with them. 

The goal of this programme was to significantly increase the productivity of key crops and/or improve household incomes for smallholder farmers by establishing plant clinics and training plant doctors. 

Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is often overlooked as a source of water supply. Yet it holds great potential to address the ever-increasing shortages of water globally. The huge potential of RWH for multiple-use services, such as food production, soil and water conservation and water, sanitation and hygiene, has not been adequately recognized, and certainly not implemented, as a solution for water problems on a wider and larger scale.

RWH initiatives are still too scattered and the lessons and results not shared. Policies, legal regulations and government budgets often do not include RWH in integrated water resource management and poverty reduction strategies.

Over the past ten years, formal recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples has significantly advanced, beginning with the adoption in 2007 by the United Nations General Assembly of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). With more than 30 years of experience working with indigenous peoples, IFAD empowers communities to participate fully in determining strategies for their development and to pursue their own goals and visions. Over the last decade, IFAD has taken steps to support indigenous peoples’ control of their own development efforts.

This publication touches on the evolution of IFAD’s engagement with indigenous peoples through the voices and perspectives of the people who worked together in this process of change. In line with the approach of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to leave no one behind, the IFAD Strategic Framework 2016-2025 reaffirms IFAD’s commitment to indigenous peoples’ self-driven development. The quotes and pictures contained here were gathered during the third global meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, at IFAD from 10 to 13 February 2017.

A recent study by the National Institute for Disaster Management (INGC)1 of Mozambique suggests that within ten years the impact of climate change will be increasingly felt within the Limpopo Corridor. The soil moisture content before the onset of the rains is set to decrease and higher temperatures and droughts are expected to increase in the southern region.

The goal of PROSUL is to improve the livelihoods and climate resilience of smallholder farmers in selected districts of the Maputo and Limpopo Corridors.

The programme, referred to as the Strengthening Rural Institutions (SRI) project, was implemented by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Eastern and Southern Africa Region from 2011 to 2014. The project aimed to bring about a sustainable rural transformation process by strengthening the “institutional infrastructure” for integrated natural resource management, food security and poverty alleviation in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. 

The project’s main goal was to support grassroots organizations to meaningfully participate in governance processes where their livelihoods and well-being, and the environment, are at stake, with an emphasis on enabling poor rural households to aggregate, mobilize and access rural services.

The goal of this programme was to develop spate irrigation policies and programmes, based on action research and documented practical experiences, that contribute to rural poverty alleviation and accelerated economic growth in marginal areas in Ethiopia, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. 

Specific objectives:  1. Strengthen networks in the four countries. 2. Prepare country policy notes. 3. Implement two innovative action research activities per country that can be scaled up. 4. Further develop knowledge, including in local languages, and open-source knowledge-sharing. 5. Train four international MSc students. 6. Incorporate spate irrigation into programmes of universities and agricultural colleges in the four target countries. 7. Create a global inventory of spate irrigation and flood-based farming systems. 8. Provide technical backstopping to IFAD projects and country programmes.

The goal of this grant was to provide best business case options to producers and consumers to recover nutrients, water and energy from agricultural and domestic wastes for food security and food safety. The project sought to identify innovative market-driven and scalable approaches to enhance the sustainability of agricultural production considering environmental and health requirements of immediate users and end-consumers. 

The development challenges were to: 1. identify and share pathways with relevant stakeholders to make business cases more replicable, scalable and sustainable; 2. strengthen national, regional and local stakeholder platforms (from agricultural and/or sanitation sectors) by extending their interest in knowledge of safe reuse as a business; 3. formulate initiatives from donors, government departments and/or the private sector in order to incorporate project results. 

The programme’s goals were to increase the food security of smallholder farm households in southern Africa and enhance their livelihoods while conserving and improving the natural resources used for agriculture.

The focus of the programme was on developing productive farming systems for smallholder farmers who managed maize-based systems, based on the principles of conservation agriculture (CA): increasing the profitability, sustainability and labour efficiency of agricultural production.

Historically, pastoralists have been marginalized, and policies have been geared towards encouraging, and in some instances forcing, their settlement and sedentarization. Misunderstanding of their livelihoods has also led to abandonment of their customary institutions and practices. However, scientific evidence shows that mobile pastoralism is the most sustainable way of using marginal lands (such as arid, cold and mountain areas). The project goal was “to develop sustainable land management and resilient livelihoods in rangeland environments”. 

The objective of the project was to develop knowledge and build capacity for pastoral advocacy, create opportunity for pastoral advocacy and engage directly in policy dialogue, in order to promote policies and investments for sustainable management of rangeland environments and pastoral livelihoods. A significant aspect of the project was strengthening networking and building a global movement on sustainable pastoralism; this relied on the credibility and recognition of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a science-based intergovernmental organization.

This programme set out to empower 35,000 vulnerable women and men in rural value chains directly and another 65,000 indirectly through direct and peer capacity-building and action learning to negotiate a better position in value chains and achieve sustainable and equitable “win-win” collaboration between value chain stakeholders. 

The programme aimed to adapt and integrate participatory action learning methodologies into the policies and practices of at least 10 civil society organizations (CSOs) and to disseminate them through e-forums and capacity- building events then to be taken up by other relevant IFAD and Oxfam projects, in countries such as Ghana, India and Sierra Leone. Knowledge institutes also contributed to participatory planning and gender mainstreaming in value chain research and training.

During the period covered by the project, the landscape of global microfinance was deeply modified and “the game has changed”. On the one hand, the saturation of the market has led to over-indebtedness of very poor clients, scandals and systemic crises that have swept the whole sector in some prominent countries. On the other hand, it has been difficult for the industry to demonstrate tangible impact and, therefore, show that it has delivered against its promises of lifting hundreds of millions of very poor people out of poverty.

In this challenging context, the project aimed to help unlock the economic potential in sub-Saharan Africa, by promoting the growth of existing financial intermediaries that serve rural areas (rural financial institutions, RFIs) so that local entrepreneurs could take advantage of new opportunities to be more productive and more competitive, and improve their living conditions sustainably.

The goal of the grant was to develop home-based production of charcoal from cooking with firewood into a new livelihood opportunity – and thus create a sustainable value chain for the economic empowerment of poor rural women.

Women from poor rural households in Ethiopia, India and Tanzania were trained to put out fires when they had finished cooking in order to prevent smouldering, and to collect household charcoal through collection clusters, process it into briquettes and market the output through innovative partnership-based enterprises.

Transparent performance reporting is a key requirement for effective resultsbased management of IFAD rural finance interventions. Better reporting, tracking and management have benefits throughout the entire IFAD project cycle, from design to implementation and learning from performance data, and for actors at different levels: partner financial service providers (FSPs); programme coordination units (PCUs); government policymakers; and IFAD decision makers and managers.

The goal of this initiative was to contribute to establishing an inclusive financial system that meets the needs of the rural poor by supporting the growth of healthy microfinance markets and microfinance service providers. Underpinning this goal is the notion that timely and credible information is critical to the functioning of markets.

The purpose of this study is to map nutrition-sensitive interventions in IFAD-funded projects in the ESA region, and to provide guidance for effective nutrition mainstreaming operations. 

The specific objectives are to: 

(1) map the various interventions used in delivering nutrition-sensitive activities; 

(2) identify pathways for nutrition outcomes; 

(3) evaluate the scale and scope of intervention implementation; 

(4) assess the effect of the project on beneficiaries; 

(5) identify and map areas of opportunities for scaling up; 

and (6) identify challenges, weaknesses and gaps. 

Les programmes et projets du FIDA en République démocratique du Congo mettent l’accent sur une transformation inclusive et durable du monde agricole et rural au sens large.

The Integrated Approach Programme on food security in Sub-Saharan Africa targets agro-ecological systems where the need to enhance food security is directly linked to opportunities for generating local and global environmental benefits.

Since initiating its first project in the country in 1980, IFAD has provided a total of US$116.2 million in financing through eight loans and three grants for programmes and projects with a total cost of US$251.9 million. The investment has benefited 513,500 households. Operations were suspended during the civil war and resumed after it ended in 2002.

At that time, IFAD and the African Development Bank established a joint programme coordination unit to facilitate the management and increase the cost-effectiveness of operations in agriculture and the rural sector.

IFAD-funded operations in Paraguay focus on empowering smallholder farmers and indigenous families by creating and strengthening rural organizations - in terms of governance, organizational administration and service capacity - to provide members with the tools they need to manage their own development.

IFAD, paying special attention to the needs of disadvantaged groups such as women, youth and indigenous peoples, focuses on strengthening the capacities of rural organizations to assist smallholder farmers in developing profitable rural businesses and tools and strategies to help cope with the challenges posed by climate change.

To achieve this goal, IFAD, in partnership with the Government of Bolivia, designs programmes to develop the technical and business skills of rural organizations, introducing technological innovations to add value to agricultural products by improving their quality and helping smallholder producers to be more competitive.
Furthermore, IFAD-funded operations facilitate the development of public-private joint ventures that help smallholder producers to gain access to markets and value chains.

The programme will focus on the development of the sugarcane industry

in Bagamoyo, while also building the local populations resilience to climate change.
 

The Community-based Integrated Natural Resources Management Project is located in the Lake Tana Watershed within Amhara National Regional State. The project covers 21 Woredas (districts) comprising 347 kebeles. 

Project operations  will consist of two components, namely: (i) Community-Based Integrated Watershed Management; and (ii) Institutional, Legal and Policy Analysis and Reform.