Knowledge

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. 

Climate change threatens the natural resource base across much of the developing world. Climate change accelerates ecosystem degradation and makes agriculture more risky. As a result, smallholder
farmers, who are so critical to global food security, are facing more extreme weather. Small-scale farmers are impacted more immediately by droughts, floods and storms, at the same time as they suffer the
gradual effects of climate change, such as water stress in crops and livestock, coastal erosion from rising sea levels and unpredictable pest infestations.

Under the 9th  Replenishment, IFAD committed to moving 80 million rural people out of poverty cumulative from 2010 onwards to 2015, and conducting 30 rigorous impact assessments. Hence the urgent need for appropriate methodologies for impact assessment. To respond to this need, a few piloting initiatives have been launched, one of which is the Improved Learning Initiative (ILI) 2. This  initiative  aims  to  develop  a  potentially  scalable  Participatory  Impact  Assessment  and Learning Approach (PIALA) that can help IFAD and its partners collaboratively assess, explain and debate its contributions to rural poverty impact. The PIALA design and piloting is funded by IFAD’s DFID-financed Innovation Mainstreaming Initiative (IMI) and BMGF’s Measurement, Learning and Evaluation Unit in the Agricultural Development Program; and with important contributions from IFAD’s Country Program Offices and partners in the pilot countries (Vietnam and Ghana), and its Strategy & Knowledge Management and Program Management Departments.

This report proceeds from the Global Forum on Remittances held in Bangkok, Thailand in 2013.

The purpose of this Guide is to support institutional and organizational analysis and strengthening (IOA/S) for design and implementation of programmes and projects.
The Guide is designed to be a practical, hands-on set of directions to those needing to answer the following questions: “how to go about doing institutional and organizational analysis? And once I’ve done it, how do I go about using this analysis to promote sustainable institutions and organizations?”

This is intended as a user-friendly Guide, the use of which could help identify strategic partners and key areas for intervention at COSOP level; to deepen the COSOP analysis at the design stage by generating interventions that support sustainable institutions and organizations, and progress
at implementation stage should be easier to monitor and evaluate effectively.