Recursos

Over the past 12 months, large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia have made headlines in a flurry of
media reports across the world. Lands that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest are now being sought by international investors to the tune of
hundreds of thousands of hectares. And while a failed attempt to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar has attracted much media attention, deals
reported in the international press constitute the tip of the iceberg. This is rightly a hot issue because land is so central to identity, livelihoods and food security.

IFAD is currently engaged in over 230 loan operations in 85 countries. About two thirds of that portfolio is related to community-based natural resource management.

Poor rural people and their institutions are at the core of this approach. Water is critical to these men and women pastoralists, fishers, farmers, young and old, part- or full-time, urban or rural, indigenous, tribal or otherwise often marginalized people. It is the key entry point for improving their livelihoods.

Climate change represents an additional challenge to rural people in SSA – and a further reason for investment in water control. Smallholder farmers, pastoralists and artisanal fishers are among the most vulnerable to this threat. 

While projections of changes in annual rainfall vary across Africa, these groups will experience the negative effects of increased temperature and
extreme events. For them, enhanced control of water will become critical in building resilience to increased climate variability.

Guidance notes for institutional analysis in rural development programmes provides a synthesis of the training materials developed as part of the Institutional Analysis (IA) methodology. They propose that we rethink how we conceptualize and promote institutional change, particularly for pro-poor service delivery. 

They provide a framework and the analytical tools for designing programmes and projects that feature implementation modalities based on some of the core principles of good governance, focusing on “pro-poor governance” and systemic sustainability at the micro and meso levels.

Women constitute two-thirds of the 1.2 billion poor people in the world. The great majority live in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, regions that are also home to most of the world’s ‘water poor’ – those with limited access to reliable, safe supplies of water for productive and domestic uses. The role women play in reducing food insecurity and poverty – through their knowledge of multiple uses of water, crop production, local biodiversity, soils and local water resources – is recognized internationally. However, despite this, they are often still excluded from decision-making processes in new water management approaches and other natural resource allocation projects and initiatives. Globalization, changing market dynamics and climate change are altering the rural context for most poor rural people, resulting in increased vulnerability to natural hazards and economic uncertainties, above all for women. 

Poverty poses a constant threat to economic growth, trade reform, private sector development, knowledge, governance and gender equality.
Poverty among the 22 members of the League of Arab States (LAS) is primarily a rural phenomenon. A quarter of the region’s population, or about 80 million people, live below national poverty lines. Between 60 and 70 percent of these poor people live in rural areas.

One of the most pressing challenges in the region is the high rate of unemployment, particularly among young people. Official unemployment rates average 13 per cent, and in some countries the jobless rate among young people is twice as high.