Knowledge

This brief shares the results and lessons learned from the first phase of the Insurance for Rural Resilience and Economic Development (INSURED) programme.

IFAD’s INSURED programme has been working with partners in Indonesia to improve the availability of climate risk insurance that enables farmers to strengthen their resilience. 

INSURED is a technical assistance programme working to strengthen agricultural insurance in IFAD’s portfolio.

Rapid inflation in 2022 exacerbated the financing challenges faced by enterprises in the midstream of agricultural value chains.

This report examines the universe of agritech and fintech providers that influence access to finance in East and Southern Africa, exploring their potential to become commercially viable and achieve scale.

This paper focuses primarily on climate resilience in the agriculture sector. If proven successful, this can be replicated in other resilience sectors such as water, forests and urban development to address shocks beyond climate. 

This briefing note summarizes the fiscal and financial instruments the public sector can use to support climate-smart small-scale farming. The overall focus is on using limited public funds more efficiently and amplifying impacts.

IFAD's unique investing position serves as a starting point for a discussion on how it might scale up and support gender-based responses for adaptation and mitigation to climate change.

Climate and conflict are linked, and this briefing note summarizes the evidence about the relationship between the two, what role climate finance can play in mitigating their risks, and where policy recommendations can be made to address the vulnerabilities created by both.

Gathering good data can reduce the cost of livestock insurance for smallholder farmers, making coverage affordable and building their resilience. The Insurance Toolkit new brief shares lessons learned in Georgia.

This knowledge brief explores the benefits of and rationale for community engagement in index insurance initiatives, with examples from a pilot project in rural Ethiopia. 

Remittances sent by migrant workers to and within Africa were over US$85 billion in 2018, of which US$25 billion were sent by migrants residing in Europe.

Understanding market demand is a critical step in the process of developing solutions to meet the risk management needs of rural poor people, particularly with regard to insurance.

This document is an overview of the lessons learned from a project on “Scaling up rural youth access to inclusive financial services for entrepreneurship and employment” in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

This report examines the factors that have contributed to the resilience of remittances during the pandemic.

This study takes stock of these experiences in an effort to contribute to building up the evidence base to help inform the future strategy and design of similar programmatic interventions.

IFAD and Slow Food share a vision of supporting small-scale, diversified production and consumption mechanisms that focus on improving the marketing of local products. 

Lessons from a quick review of the diverse and varied financial schemes designed for, accessed by and used by poor smallholders and other rural stakeholders in IFAD’s project portfolio in West and Central Africa over the decade leading up to 2020.

Prototyping aims to gather direct feedback on the solution and the wider insurance scheme, incorporate changes before pilot testing, and make any additional adjustments before the official roll-out.

This Inclusive Financial Services (IFS) stocktaking exercise assesses IFAD’s capacity to deliver IFS and addresses rural poor market development needs both historically and looking forward within the context of emerging opportunities and challenges.

This report compiles experiences and lessons shared in a Live Talks series on Risk Management for Agri-SME Finance between September and December 2020. 

This report documents the results achieved from the work among all SAFIN partners.

What risks and challenges do small-scale producers of oilseeds in Uganda face, and could agricultural insurance help them manage and mitigate those risks?

This feasibility study explains the role of remittances in agricultural risk management.

In a rapidly changing world, agriculture remains the heart of sustainable development. The risks facing the world in this final decade left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals are many, but the opportunities are equally numerous.

This case study examines a pilot initiative carried out by the IFAD-supported FIER project in Mali, together with the Babyloan crowdfunding platform, to leverage diaspora remittances abroad as a way to support rural entrepreneurship in the home country. 

The Agri-Business Capital Fund (ABC Fund) invests in smallholder farmers and rural small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries to support sustainable and inclusive agricultural value chains. 

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. 

This manual discusses the strategy, lessons learned and recommendations of Atikha in scaling up initiatives in mobilizing migrant resources towards agriculture development in the country. 

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.

Since 1979, IFAD has worked with the Government of Sudan to develop structural reforms that tackle the roots of poverty. IFAD has continued to support rural people in Sudan through investment projects focusing on sustainable resource management, value-chain development and support to farmer organizations. 

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 Asia and the Pacific region includes the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic countries and is a key driver of growth in the world economy.

This programme, also known as FinServAccess, aimed to enhance access to sustainable rural financial services for smallholder producers and
agroentrepreneurs, so they are better equipped to face emerging challenges and benefit from new opportunities.

In the context of population growth, increasing inequality and natural resource depletion, universal access to energy – specifically to renewable energy (RE) – now has high importance on political agendas. 

Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is often associated with economic development and considered vital to alleviating extreme poverty (World Bank, 2018). Yet access to clean sources of energy is still a challenge for many smallholder farmers, their families and rural entrepreneurs.

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. 

The Outreach Project was implemented in selected African countries (Gambia, Mozambique, and Tanzania) and aimed to improve the financia inclusion strategies of ongoing IFAD-funded operations by transferring and adapting innovative solutions, tools and methodologies previously tested in various countries of the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region.

​RemitSCOPE, a new website portal, is designed to provide data, analyses and remittancemarket1 profiles on individual countries or areas. In coordination with the Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development 2018, RemitSCOPE is being launched to provide market profiles for 50 countries or areas in the Asia and the Pacific region.

The additional four regions will be included gradually: Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and Near East and the Caucasus. RemitSCOPE intends to address the fast-changing market realities in the remittance industry in order to help bring together the goals of remittance families, as clients, and the strategies of the private-sector service providers. RemitSCOPE is designed as a free, one-stop shop that is available to any organization or entity interested in accessing all relevant public information on remittances.  

The overall goal of the grant funding was to strengthen the capacity of development practitioners in developing countries to identify, design and
implement more effective interventions aimed at increasing access to rural and agricultural finance.

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.

Of the US$450 billion that migrant workers send home to developing countries every year, between 30 and 40 per cent goes to rural areas. At the starting point of the migration chain, people leave rural areas to seek opportunities elsewhere due to a lack of opportunities closer to home. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) are uniquely capable of serving the needs of remittance recipients, while reinvesting surplus funds to improve opportunities for the local community.

South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTC) is a key development instrument that can contribute to achieving the objectives of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It provides unprecedented opportunities for developing countries to leverage their own experience, knowledge and resources in support of social and economic transformation of their, and other, people.

Index insurance has a role to play in agricultural development and risk management, yet it faces operational and technical challenges to reach scale and sustainability. Data are a key challenge and were the focus of the project “Improving Agricultural Risk Management in Sub-Saharan Africa: Remote Sensing for Index Insurance”. Limited availability, accessibility, quantity and poor quality of data on the ground are some of the primary technical constraints preventing scale-up and sustainability of index insurance. Without sufficient quality data, either it is impossible to design products for some areas and countries, or products that are designed can become unreliable, not compensating when they should. These inconsistencies intensify vulnerability, lead to distrust of insurance, and ultimately have an impact on demand. This publication details the project, which investigated overcoming issues with ground data by using remote sensing data for index insurance. It describes the different remote sensing options and opportunities available for index insurance, but it also recommends further investment in research and development, supplementary ground data and capacity-building going forward. 

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) were both created in response to the food crises of the 1970s. We have worked together for more than 20 years to catalyze agricultural and rural development and improve food security in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

IFAD and IFPRI have strengthened the productivity and resilience of smallholder farmers and other rural people, with a particular focus on helping expand their access to innovative local farming methods, climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies and financing, and more profitable markets.

To further promote rural development and transformation, IFAD and IFPRI have built cutting-edge information systems and tools that deliver sound data and analyses to governments, donors, farmer organizations, and other stakeholders. As a result, the two organizations have fostered evidence-based policy making and investments that promote agricultural growth and rural development.

This report provides data and analysis of remittances and migration trends for developing countries over the past decade, as well as the potential contributions of remittance families to reaching the SDGs by 2030.

On 15 and 16 June 2017, on the occasion of the International Day of Family Remittances, over 350 practitioners from the public and private sectors gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the fifth Global Forum on Remittances, Investment and Development (GFRID). The participants had the opportunity to discuss challenges and opportunities in the remittance market, and present innovative approaches and successful business models, framing the discussions around the role of migrants’ remittances and investment towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) by 2030.

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.