المعرفة

Trail Blazers: Stories of Women Champions from IFAD Projects presents snapshots of the lives and achievements of simple rural women from the project areas whose immense courage and dynamic leadership helped improve their own lives as well as the lives of their families and communities. 

This report is the fruit of that endeavour and builds on efforts by IWMI, IFAD and many others to document and understand the impacts of PIM. 

Through the systematic review of 24 IFAD-funded PIM interventions and field observations from 5 project sites in the Asian region this study sheds new light on what works, where and why. 

Our study examines WUAs that have been created by IFAD projects and those which pre-date it’s interventions but are the main focus of capacity building or restructuring. 

Fragile states are home to nearly 30 per cent of the
world’s poor people. Though measures of fragility
vary, such countries typically lack some of the
basic tools of nationbuilding: good governance,
strong policies, skilled personnel, functional
infrastructure and services, educated citizens, an active
civil society and a competitive private sector.
Civil and border conflict is an all-too frequent reality.
Poor people living in rural areas of fragile states are
particularly vulnerable as they have very limited
means to cope with the situation created by fragility.

The country’s challenge now is to create the conditions for economic growth – and the Government of Togo believes that the best way to achieve lasting growth is through increased production and productivity in the agriculture sector.

For these reasons, after more than a decade out of the country, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is working closely with the Republic of Togo to put agricultural and rural development on track.

There is a growing need to investigate different crop production systems that prevent soil degradation while increasing productivity. Conservation agriculture (CA) offers a promising solution. Conservation agriculture is a climate resilient technology and management system that has demonstrable potential to secure sustained productivity and livelihood improvements for millions of climate-dependent farmers working in semi-arid areas around the world. Success stories are recorded for some countries in Asia, and in Australia and Brazil. However, for sub-Saharan Africa adoption of the technology has lagged behind these other countries, and concerns have been raised as to the suitability of the technology within the smallholder farming context.

The already vulnerable Sahel area is highly exposed to climate change impacts due to the strong dependence of its population on rainfed agriculture and livestock. Rainfall variability, land degradation and desertification are some of the key factors that are heavily impacting on local livelihoods. Droughts with varying degrees
of severity occur in two out of every five years, making harvests of the major food and cash crops highly uncertain. The recurrent droughts of the 1970s and 1980s caused huge losses of agricultural production and livestock, the loss of human lives to hunger and malnutrition, and the massive displacement of people and
shattered economies. Most climate models predict that the Sahel region will become even drier during this century.