Southern and Eastern Regions Rural Rehabilitation Project

The first project to be funded by IFAD in the country shared the government’s objectives for rural development:

• rehabilitating facilities and  providing services for disadvantaged and long-neglected rural communities in hill areas
• reducing poverty by improving rural incomes on a sustainable basis through increased production and productivity
• promoting alternative sources of employment for growing numbers of unemployed people

To achieve the objectives, the project:

• established a revolving credit fund to support economic rehabilitation in districts where people had no access to the credit they needed to finance small-scale agricultural activities, including livestock production, and off-farm enterprises
• established linkages between producers at wholesale and retail levels and put potential borrowers in contact with the private financial institution that administered the revolving credit fund
• made the credit fund flexible so that lending policies could respond to changing market opportunities

Working in partnership with the government, the project supported the establishment of a governmental Department of Rural Rehabilitation, which had a key role in rural development. The department actively promoted expansion of the revolving credit fund’s lending programme. Through the Agency for the Development of Underdeveloped Regions (ADUR) the government undertook to rehabilitate rural infrastructure in the project area.