Knowledge

Brochure illustrating IFAD's support to cocoa value-chain development.

What can information and communication technologies (ICTs) do for the world's 900 million extremely poor people who live in rural area? The question is crucial to the fight to enable rural poor people to overcome poverty.

This document reports on the remarkable achievements of the Financing Facility for Remittances (FFR) in its five years of operation. It provides an overview of the importance of remittances to development, the strategy that the Facility has adopted to date, and the lessons. 

The FFR Brief learned from the innovative projects it has financed. Looking forward, the report highlights the tremendous opportunities offered by large-scale distribution networks, adoption of new technologies, mobilization of migrant capital and partnering with the private sector. Each chapter has been designed to be readable as a stand-alone discussion of the specific topic area it addresses. As a number of projects resulted in lessons learned in multiple areas, projects may be mentioned more than once, and their impact in each topic area will be discussed separately.

This report is an executive summary of a forthcoming compilation of studies on remittances to Asia and the Pacific. The findings are based on a series of studies commissioned by IFAD and carried out by Developing Markets Associates, the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), the World Bank and the World Savings Bank Institute, and studies and analyses undertaken by the World Bank. 

An analysis of lessons learnt from field application of IFAD’s sourcebook on institutional and organizational analysis for pro-poor change.

IFAD and the Government of Mauritius are moving towards a new form of partnership that differs from the standard model for low-income countries, which was followed in Mauritius until 2005. 

IFAD recognizes that the country now has sufficient national resources to address rural poverty, so the focus of interventions has shifted from financing projects towards developing a collaborative approach with the government to reduce the incidence of poverty.

This approach includes policy dialogue, knowledge management and sharing, and partnership-building.

IFAD first worked in Seychelles in 1991, when it began financing the Employment Generation Project, which was completed six years later.
More recently, stakeholders from Seychelles have participated in activities funded by an ongoing IFAD grant, which supports the Regional Initiative for Smallholder Agriculture Adaptation to Climate Change in the Indian Ocean Islands. This initiative is creating a regional knowledge-management platform on adaptation strategies for small-scale farmers.

The platform actively disseminates information on conservation agriculture practices such as farming with low or zero tillage, as well as composting, integrating livestock and farming activities, and other environmentally sustainable measures.

Farmers’ Africa is a capacity-building programme that aims to improve the livelihoods and food security of rural producers in Africa. It works with farmers’ organizations (FOs) to help them evolve into more stable, performing and accountable organizations that effectively represent their members and advise them on farming enterprises. 

The programme supports the main functions of FOs, promotes their engagement in policy processes and contributes to their professionalization. It also supports the efforts of FOs to provide economic services to their members. The total cost of the programme is estimated at EUR 40 million over five years and includes an overall contribution of EUR 26.9 million from the European Union (EU). 

The rapid growth in consumer demand for sustainable agricultural products represents an enormous opportunity for small-scale farmers and producers in developing countries.

To help them seize this and other opportunities, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) funds a range of projects in rural areas. A growing number of projects support smallholder production of commodities that are certified under programmes such as Fairtrade, Organic, UTZ Certified and Rainforest Alliance, including:

• Cocoa and coffee in Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, and Sierra Leone

• Fruits in the South Pacific and Madagascar

• Cosmetic and medicinal plants in India and Southern Africa.

This technical note serves as a guide to the design of appropriate programme interventions that apply value chain financing approaches to the development of competitive agricultural value chains. 

It emphasizes interventions that promote financial inclusiveness and the overall development goals of governments, as well as those of technical and funding agencies.