Knowledge

Ghana has the third largest IFAD country programme in the West and Central Africa region. The programme contributes to building inclusive and
sustainable institutions, backed by pro-poor investments and policies as well as relevant innovation and learning. IFAD supports the main thrusts of the government’s Ghana Shared Growth and Development Agenda – including accelerated agricultural modernization, sustainable natural resource
management and enhanced private-sector competitiveness. 

Its work also aligns with Ghana’s Medium Term Agriculture Sector Investment Plan on food security, income growth and other programme areas related to rural poverty reduction.

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.

The World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism (WISP) is a global knowledge and advocacy network that promotes understanding of sustainable pastoral development for both poverty reduction and sustainable environmental management. WISP was executed by the International Union for Nature Conservation (IUCN).

The Programme built the capacity of pastoral institutions to engage in advocacy based on state-of-the-art global learning on sustainable pastoralism, enabling pastoralist institutions around the world to network and shared experiences and opportunities, and ensured that the voice of pastoralists remained central to policy discourse and learning.

Land is fundamental to the lives of poor rural people. It is a source of food, shelter, income and social identity.

Secure access to land reduces vulnerability to hunger and poverty. But for many of the world’s poor rural people in developing countries, access is becoming more tenuous than ever. 

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.  

 IFAD has been working in small island developing states (SIDS) for 35 years, financing investments for smallholder farmers and fishers.

IFAD recognizes that small island developing states are different than other developing countries. 

They face constraints that are quite particular to their size, remoteness, insularity and ocean resource base. In the light of a changing world and new challenges faced by rural people living in SIDS, IFAD recently took the opportunity of the Global Conference on Small Island Developing States held in Samoa in 2014 to articulate its lessons learned and current approach to financing investment in rural people in its paper presented at the Conference, IFAD’s approach in Small Island Developing States.

The objective of the IFAD Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF) is to strengthen indigenous peoples’ communities and their organizations by financing small projects that foster their self-driven development in the framework of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and to generate lessons learned and approaches for replication and up-scaling.

The Indigenous Peoples Assistance Facility (IPAF)1 finances small projects designed and implemented directly by indigenous peoples’ communities and their organizations. The projects are selected through global calls for proposals, based on a competitive process. In managing the IPAF when it was established in 2007, IFAD realized that the Facility was not only a grant-making mechanism, but it also contained a wealth of knowledge derived from the project proposals themselves. With its limited funding, the IPAF can support only a small number of these proposals. Thus, a knowledge-harvesting mechanism was set up with funding from the Initiative for Mainstreaming Innovation (IMI). 

Equitable access to land and tenure security for IFAD’s target groups are essential for rural development and poverty eradication. Tenure security influences the extent to which farmers are prepared to invest in improvements in production and land management. 

Interventions to be scaled-up are in this note are: (i) Recognition and recording of multiple and sometimes overlapping rights in community-level land use, watershed management, territorial, rangeland and forest management planning processes; (ii) Registration of land ownership and use rights; (iii) Equitable land access; (iv) Land conflict resolution and access to judiciary and legal aid and; (v) Civic education and public awareness-raising. 

Smallholder livestock production is largely based on family farming and is key to poor rural people’s livelihoods, food security and employment creation. 

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.

Smallholder farmers are in the front line of climate change impacts. The ecosystems on which they rely are increasingly degraded and their access to suitable agricultural land and to forest resources is declining.

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.

Taller regional de América Latina y el Caribe en preparación de la segunda reunión mundial del Foro de Pueblos Indígenas en el FIDA.

Africa Regional Workshop in preparation for the Second Global Meeting of the Indigenous Peoples’ Forum at IFAD.

This case study illustrates how the Men's Campfire Conference (household methodology) has been used effectively in Zambia, highlighting how it has worked in a particular context. Links are provided to resources and online materials.

This case study illustrates how the household approach for gender, HIV and AIDS mainstreaming has been used effectively in Malawi, highlighting how it has worked in a particular context. Links are provided to resources and online materials.

To address food security problems and soaring prices for basic commodities, in December 2008 the European Union launched a Food Facility totalling €1 billion spread over three years, from 2009 to 2011. Under this initiative, the regional programme IFAD-EU-ECOWAS Food Facility was established with a budget of €20 million. The regional programme covers a number of countries in West Africa.

To assure food security and protect the population from recurrent crises, countries dependent on foreign aid for much of their food supply, such as Benin, Mali, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, have designed strategies and programmes to support food security that are intended to increase food production through the intensification of strategic crops such as rice, cassava, yams and ground nuts, and widespread use of selected seeds and mineral fertilizers.

The Belgian Fund for Food Security (BFFS) was created by the Belgian Parliament in 1983 in response to the more than one million drought- and faminerelated deaths in East Africa. BFFS provides grants to pay for rural development projects, with a focus on food security and nutrition, in some of the poorest countries in Africa, helping extremely poor people to become healthier and more productive and lowering the risk that they will face starvation. 

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized United Nations agency, was established as an international financial institution in 1977 as one of the major outcomes of the 1974 World Food Conference. It is dedicated to eradicating poverty and hunger in rural areas of developing countries. Through low-interest loans and grants, it develops and finances programmes and projects that enable poor rural people to overcome poverty themselves.