Savoirs

This paper provides an overview of concepts, issues and research on the relationship between financial inclusion and inclusive rural transformation.

It demonstrates how changing demand for financial services, innovations in rural finance, and different investment strategies affect the interplay of supply and demand.

This paper analyses how different types of social protection interventions affect rural livelihoods. It examines how these interventions can help rural transformation by increasing productivity and asks how they can influence inclusiveness.

Using country-level evidence, it suggests that the effectiveness of social protection depends upon specific contexts and combinations of interventions, and asks what this means for building policy. 

During the period covered by the project, the landscape of global microfinance was deeply modified and “the game has changed”. On the one hand, the saturation of the market has led to over-indebtedness of very poor clients, scandals and systemic crises that have swept the whole sector in some prominent countries. On the other hand, it has been difficult for the industry to demonstrate tangible impact and, therefore, show that it has delivered against its promises of lifting hundreds of millions of very poor people out of poverty.

In this challenging context, the project aimed to help unlock the economic potential in sub-Saharan Africa, by promoting the growth of existing financial intermediaries that serve rural areas (rural financial institutions, RFIs) so that local entrepreneurs could take advantage of new opportunities to be more productive and more competitive, and improve their living conditions sustainably.

The goal of the grant was to develop home-based production of charcoal from cooking with firewood into a new livelihood opportunity – and thus create a sustainable value chain for the economic empowerment of poor rural women.

Women from poor rural households in Ethiopia, India and Tanzania were trained to put out fires when they had finished cooking in order to prevent smouldering, and to collect household charcoal through collection clusters, process it into briquettes and market the output through innovative partnership-based enterprises.

Transparent performance reporting is a key requirement for effective resultsbased management of IFAD rural finance interventions. Better reporting, tracking and management have benefits throughout the entire IFAD project cycle, from design to implementation and learning from performance data, and for actors at different levels: partner financial service providers (FSPs); programme coordination units (PCUs); government policymakers; and IFAD decision makers and managers.

The goal of this initiative was to contribute to establishing an inclusive financial system that meets the needs of the rural poor by supporting the growth of healthy microfinance markets and microfinance service providers. Underpinning this goal is the notion that timely and credible information is critical to the functioning of markets.

This paper examines the impact of IFAD-supported projects so as to learn lessons for future projects. It analyses the different methods used by IFAD to measure a project's impact, finds that IFAD is improving the well-being of rural people, and recommends that impact assessments be built into future projects from their inception.

The purpose of this study is to map nutrition-sensitive interventions in IFAD-funded projects in the ESA region, and to provide guidance for effective nutrition mainstreaming operations. 

The specific objectives are to: 

(1) map the various interventions used in delivering nutrition-sensitive activities; 

(2) identify pathways for nutrition outcomes; 

(3) evaluate the scale and scope of intervention implementation; 

(4) assess the effect of the project on beneficiaries; 

(5) identify and map areas of opportunities for scaling up; 

and (6) identify challenges, weaknesses and gaps. 

South-South and triangular cooperation has an enormous potential role in agriculture and rural development in developing countries, both in unlocking diverse experiences and lessons and in providing solutions to pressing development challenges.

From the cases that follow, a number of common lessons emerge. First, it is important to create a space for interaction and cross-country learning. In the Scaling up Micro-Irrigation Systems project or with the household mentoring approach, for instance, workshops and ‘writeshops’ gathered people from diverse countries who could then share their own knowledge and experiences. In such spaces, participants could compare how a similar approach or technology required certain adaptations to better fit with local cultural, social and environmental contexts, offering important lessons for future scaling up.

Sometimes individual champions can make a difference. In Madagascar, the project design for a public/private partnership improved drastically when an IFAD consultant with similar experience in another country became involved. In this case, it was also an ‘unexpected outcome’, as the innovation came from a replacement for the regular consultant, who had broken his foot …. So even through small staff changes, knowledge of a complementary innovation from another country can have a big impact.

​Biodiversity is about more than plants, animals, and micro-organisms and their ecosystems – the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 1992) recognizes that it is also very much about people and our need for food security, medicines, fresh air, shelter, and a clean and healthy environment. Biodiversity is also essential for the maintenance of ecosystem-based services, such as the provision of water and food for human, animal and plant life. When we make an effort to conserve biodiversity, we are helping to maintain critical global biological resources to meet our needs today as well as those of future generations. Biodiversity conservation is therefore central to achieving recent global commitments for sustainable development under “Agenda 2030”, adopted by the United Nations in 2015. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) recognizes that losing biodiversity means losing opportunities for coping with future challenges, such as those posed by climate change and food insecurity.