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Financial exclusion is acute in rural Mozambique, and women are disproportionately impacted. Closing the funding gap to catalyse private-sector investment in rural communities can make all the difference.

We asked four farmers’ organization leaders from around the world about current challenges, new developments and their hopes for the future at the eighth global meeting of the Famers’ Forum.

Growing food is a challenge in the harsh desert landscape of northwestern China. But thanks to new greenhouses built by a local cooperative, this village is bursting with fruits, vegetables and mushrooms.

There’s an international day for nearly every global issue you can think of. Learn how they come into being, the key observances for rural people – and why they matter.

Climate finance is complicated, and we get a lot of questions about everything it entails. We’ve put together some answers to the ones we receive most often.

Climate change, commercial agribusiness, and societal norms threaten small-scale farmers’ way of life in a small village in Sudan. A women’s savings and credit group is changing this.

Conventional wisdom has long held that giving grants to small-scale farmers produces temporary gains at best. But recently, our research into a grants-based intervention employed by PRICE, an IFAD-funded initiative in Rwanda, found benefits that have lasted for five years and counting.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Just as the shadow of COVID-19 was lifting from many parts of the world, new crises have arisen – and they’re a particularly difficult challenge for poor rural people in developing countries.

Sustainable development can only be achieved with the contributions of rural women, yet they face many challenges. Let’s meet three women who have transformed their lives with the help of the JP RWEE initiative.

IFAD and UN Women were each working in rural China, helping women access new opportunities and gain an equal say in their communities. Then the two agencies decided to collaborate, opening up new ways to fulfil their respective mandates – rural development on one hand, and women’s empowerment on the other.

Farming can be a risky business indeed. Recently, some IFAD-supported initiatives have begun piloting crop insurance programmes for participating farmers – and for KCEP-CRAL farmers in Kenya, the new insurance policies arrived just in time.

Two years ago, COVID-19 closures forced us all apart – but the creative use of technology helped keep us together. Today, with tech giants promising to take all of us into the metaverse, IFAD is exploring how cutting-edge technology can help us see the world through each other’s eyes.

Marta had never left her community before and was nervous to travel. Many told Carmelina not to go, saying India was too far and six months was too long to be away. But despite their concerns, the two women embarked on their journey, determined to bring electricity to their communities.

Every year, we recognize a project from each of our regions that empowers rural women and girls. Here, we present the winners of the 2021 Gender Awards.

To make sure we’re investing in what works and achieving maximum impact, we evaluated 17 of our project Impact Assessments to look for broader trends. The results have implications for everyone who works in rural development – from those on the ground to the donors who make this work possible.

Peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests and are home to everything from orchids to orangutans – but today, these lands are in peril. A partnership between IFAD and Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry is working to set a national policy agenda that will protect peatland ecosystems.

In recent years, saline intrusion – the encroachment of seawater into fresh water sources – has become a serious threat to small-scale farmers in Viet Nam’s Mekong Delta. Thanks to a public-private partnership, a local technology company was able to collaborate with an IFAD-supported project to create a lasting solution.

Farmers and agribusinesses across the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly making use of new digital technologies. IFAD and Grow Asia have recently released a report exploring how these technologies are reshaping the region’s agriculture and how IFAD’s investments can accelerate the adoption of these technologies.

Lesotho’s efforts to nationalize its wool and mohair industry set off a cascade of unintended consequences. At the government’s request, IFAD and the WAMPP project commissioned a study to analyze the impacts of these regulations and inform future policy revisions.

Helping the people of the Sahel prosper requires a Great Green Wall stretching across Africa. IFAD is embarking on a series of projects to help build this “wall.” We recently sat down with the World Bank to learn from their successes and challenges across a decade of their own project implementations in this region.

Digital agriculture is an indispensable part of strengthening food systems. IFAD’s recent stocktake of our ICT interventions in the Asia-Pacific region has revealed over 50 active solutions and some critical gaps to address.

In a country where artisanal bread is the rule rather than the exception, the Qena community bakery stands out among the rest – and it’s run entirely by rural women.

The Kenya National Farmers’ Federation is implementing a mobile information platform to serve its members and other Kenyan farmers.

Risk and uncertainty intensify in the agriculture sector – especially throughout Africa.

Rural young people are increasingly concerned about the environment. Many of them work in sectors that are threatened by climate change, and they’re well aware that their industry and food systems will need to become more resilient and sustainable than ever before.

All too often, the path to sustainable development is blocked by outdated policies and legislation.

IFAD is always exploring new lending instruments to increase the number of potential financial solutions it can offer.

In dozens of homes across Bouenza, the volunteers gathered around their kitchen tables, ready to taste-test a new variety of flour.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, an organization whose commitment is to bring nations together to preserve peace and security and improve lives. IFAD is symbolic of that commitment.

Although the residents of the global South may live worlds apart from each other, they often face a surprisingly similar set of challenges.

Agricultural extension services play a fundamental role in building producers’ capacities to maintain good agricultural practices.

Zainab Semgalawe, lead regional technical specialist, talks about rural institutions

Tom Mwangi Anyonge, lead technical specialist at IFAD , talks about youth, rural development and institutions.

How can we enhance local capacity to respond to this emergency in an agile and inclusive manner?

The story of the Afro-Colombian community has always been one of resilience. Historically, this group has faced the country’s highest rates of poverty and food insecurity, and has lacked access to many basic services.

The tremendous progress in reducing poverty made by India over the past 25 years could now be reversed because of the unprecedented emergency facing all of us – the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the ways in which we produce, market and consume food need to be reconciled with environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Government and development leaders today made an urgent call for greater investment in rural development to address hunger and poverty caused by conflict and climate change.

Heads of state, ministers, development leaders, and celebrities today called for greater investment in rural areas to accelerate progress to achieve a world free from poverty and hunger in the next 10 years.

IFAD is the only IFI with the specific mandate to eradicate poverty and hunger by investing in poor rural people through financial and technical assistance to agriculture and rural development projects in developing member states.