Knowledge

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.