Knowledge

In Jordan, the success of a project co-funded by IFAD largely rested on how quickly rural women were able to learn about borrowing money and setting up and running their own small enterprises.

Somalia’s poverty and food security situation remains critical after years of conflict and natural disasters. Since the 1980s, IFAD has supported nine programmes in the country for a total of US$140 million.
There is currently no country strategic opportunities programme for Somalia.

However, the strategic objectives of IFAD interventions in Somalia can be summarized as follows:
• Increase incomes and food security by supporting agriculture and related activities, improving access to water, sanitation and health care, strengthening the natural resource base and building rural financial services;
• Identify and promote pro-poor investment mechanisms in rural areas for dissemination, replication and scaling up; and
• Build the capacity of the diaspora and promote the transformation of people in the diaspora into agents of development through remittances – the portion of their earnings that migrants outside the country send home.

In 2013, IFAD commissioned a study to analyse project management arrangements for market‑oriented smallholder agriculture. As IFAD adapts to the changing development discourse, the organization has focused increasingly on improving Project Management Unit (PMU) arrangements in order to provide more effective and expanded management and technical skills. This review was undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of PMUs and their alignment with the Paris Declaration principles, as well as to identify lessons or frameworks to guide future project management and implementation arrangements. It investigated five case studies drawn from different regions and types of projects.  

With almost four decades of engagement in more than 70 countries and more than US$1.1 billion invested in rural finance (RF) initiatives, IFAD has rich and multifaceted experience, a global network of partners working at the frontier of innovation and hundreds of different types of providers addressing the financial needs of poor rural households as their clients. Most of the 3 billion people in rural areas still live on less than US$2 a day. Challenges such as economic shocks, food shortages and climate change affect poor people disproportionately. Poor rural households are typically excluded from opportunities in the formal financial sector.

The initial step in scaling up smallholder organizations is to clarify and examine the elements that work best and decide which of these to scale up. The elements to be considered include the organizational components embedded in projects related to capacity-building, such as the managerial and technical skills and governance systems that enable organizations to fulfil their core functions and achieve their missions more effectively.

This note highlights the lessons learned in supporting smallholder institutions and organizations. 

This How To Do Note guides design and country teams in conducting an initial analysis of organizations and their capacity development needs at the project design stage. It provides a conceptual framework and practical suggestions and tools to help practitioners systematically collate and summarize information captured during design missions.