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The 2020 ILO-UNICEF Global Estimates of Child Labour reported that progress towards reducing child labour had stalled for the first time in 20 years.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s drylands – that is, the areas where more water is lost through evaporation than gained through rainfall – are facing widespread degradation. There are many factors causing this, but one of the most prominent is the use of agricultural practices that aren’t adapted to the land, such as overgrazing and intensive agriculture.

IFAD and the Government of the State of Maranhão signed a financing agreement today for the implementation of the Amazon Sustainable Management Project (PAGES). Implemented in Brazil’s state with the highest poverty and food insecurity rates, the project will address the entrenched environmental degradation of the Amazonian forest.

The Great Green Wall was envisioned as a line of trees stretching across Africa to protect against desertification. Today, it is a mosaic of farms, forests, and wilderness, where sustainable agriculture is the norm and rural-dwellers thrive.

As the war in Ukraine pushes food, fuel and fertilizer prices toward record levels putting food security in many of the world’s poorest countries at risk, IFAD today launched a Crisis Response Initiative to ensure that small-scale farmers in high-risk countries can produce food over the next few months to feed their families and communities while reducing the threat to future harvests.

Don Lolo has been growing coffee on the slopes of El Playón in Honduras for over fifty years. Now, thanks to support from IFAD’s Rural Poor Stimulus Facility, he's using an online banking app to apply for loans, manage savings, and reach new buyers.

With land degradation gaining ground and affecting up to 40% of lands on Earth, IFAD today called for a significant increase in investments to help small-scale farmers protect and restore lands and ecosystems, build their resilience to climate change, and ensure long-term global food security.

International model, actress and Goodwill Ambassador for the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Sabrina Elba, arrives in Kenya today on an official visit.

From California to the Sahel, from the steppes of Central Asia to the Andes, drylands are some of the most productive ecosystems in the world. But they’re also some of the most fragile.

When Fatima-Zohra first arrived in her new home, a rural village in the Moroccan highlands, she discovered the local women didn’t have many job opportunities. But they were enthusiastic about the idea of going into business for themselves – and so Fatima-Zohra got to work.

The Vice President of IFAD, Dominik Ziller, will meet with Edouard Ngirente, Prime Minister of the Republic of Rwanda, as well as other high-level government officials during a visit starting 9 May.

As the risk of global food security rises due to the war in Ukraine, IFAD will launch its Crisis Response Initiative (CRI) at a press conference in Nairobi.

The war in Ukraine is testing the resilience of the people of Moldova, including its small-scale farmers. Our support is essential for helping them respond to the crisis – but opportunities to help are slipping through our fingers.

We know a thing or two about connecting youth with the financial services they need to start a business – but there’s always more to learn. Here, we reflect on some of our “lessons learned” as part of a recent grant programme in East Africa.

In many countries, we have the opportunity to partner with public policies and programmes to deliver the services our project participants need. Although effective inter-institutional coordination is never simple, it is doable – and entirely worth the effort.    

At the heart of this year’s session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is “free, prior and informed consent.” Quite a mouthful! But what does it really mean? And why does it matter?

We used GIS to assess the impact of IFAD-supported projects on the likelihood of conflict in fragile contexts. Our results suggest that the presence of IFAD interventions may prevent conflicts from arising and reduce the overall number of conflicts.    

This episode is all about closing the social justice gap in rural communities and developing countries.

Learn more about food sovereignty and what it means for indigenous peoples with Dr Elifuraha Laltaika, a professor of law and expert on indigenous peoples’ rights.

Over the millennia, indigenous peoples have developed practices that honour the interconnectedness of people and nature – yet all too often, their contributions are overlooked and devalued. IFAD is committed to supporting indigenous peoples in overcoming poverty and meeting global challenges through building on their identities and cultures.