International Fund for Agricultural Development

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Thematic Focus
• Strategy
• Achievements

Overview

The International Fund for Agricultural Development's (IFAD) mission is to enable poor rural people to achieve food security and overcome poverty. A specialized agency of the United Nations, IFAD finances innovative agricultural and rural development projects through low-interest loans and grants. These projects help the poor increase food production, raise incomes, and improve health and nutrition.

Worldwide, nearly 2 billion rural people live on less than US$2/day. Most are smallholder farmers and their families, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Canada is a founding member of IFAD and has a seat on its 18-member Executive Board.

In October 2009, Canada doubled its support to IFAD to $75 million over the next three years, as part of CIDA's increasing food security strategy. This contribution is an important component of the Prime Minister's announcement at the 2009 L'Aquila G-8 Summit to double Canada's investment in food security.

CIDA, together with the Foreign Ministries of the Netherlands and Norway, contributed to an independent assessment (PDF, 277 KB, 78 pages) of IFAD's reform efforts and is helping to strengthen IFAD's evaluation capacity. CIDA is also working closely with IFAD to strengthen IFAD's policies and practices related to equality between women and men.

Since 1978, IFAD has empowered more than 350 million people to grow more food, better manage their land and other natural resources, learn new skills, start small businesses, build strong organizations and gain a voice in the decisions that affect their lives.

Thematic Focus

IFAD's mandate aligns closely with two of CIDA's priority themes: increasing food security and stimulating sustainable economic growth. IFAD works directly with smallholder farmers in 90 low and middle-income countries including Afghanistan, Haiti and Sudan. About half of its programming is in Africa.

Food security

IFAD's work in sustainable agricultural development makes it one of CIDA's key multilateral partners in increasing agriculture productivity and addressing the specific needs of smallholder farmers.

Economic growth

IFAD's emphasis on smallholder farmers―who represent the developing world's largest group of private sector entrepreneurs―aligns with CIDA's focus on supporting the growth of micro and small sized businesses.

It is important that the 450 million small farms worldwide―on whom a third of the world's population depends―are adequately supported and equipped with products and services, especially knowledge and technology. Increasing the productivity and nutrition of smallholder farmers will result in increased incomes and health for their families and their communities.

CIDA's Strategy for Working with IFAD

CIDA's work with IFAD focuses on three strategic objectives:

1. Encouraging IFAD to invest more resources in smallholder farmers, in particular to invest in productivity gains that will improve both the quantity and nutritional quality of food production. This includes:
   • Strengthening IFAD's country strategies to ensure that smallholder farmers (particularly women) benefit from IFAD-supported projects
   • Improving connections between small farms and both national and international markets
   • Encouraging IFAD to work in better cooperation with international agricultural research centres―in particular the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research―to scale up tested innovations with smallholder farmers
2. Working with IFAD to ensure IFAD programs fit within food security systems at the country, regional and international levels. This includes:
   • Leveraging IFAD's previous experience with the world's poorest farmers to more actively engage with other organizations and groups involved in agricultural development such as multilateral donors, non-governmental organizations, universities and the private sector
   • Better coordinating with these groups and exploring increased joint programming
3. Encouraging IFAD to build on its recent reforms aimed at improving the effectiveness of the organization. This includes:
   • Pushing IFAD to continue implementing its Management for Development Results framework aimed at improving IFAD's ability to measure, report and achieve results in the field
   • Encouraging IFAD to further strengthen its independent evaluation function and implement its recently adopted human resource strategy

Achievements

In 2010, with the support of CIDA and other donors, IFAD:

• Trained 277,000 people in business and entrepreneurship and 1,169,000 people in community management
• Trained 4 million people to use improved agricultural practices and technologies
• Repaired or constructed 21,000 kilometres of roads, resulting in strengthened farm-access road networks
• Trained more than 63,000 people in natural resource management issues through 13 projects
• Built 145 market facilities and 22 storage facilities in nine countries across Asia and the Pacific
• Strengthened access to markets for producers by training more than 22,000 poor rural people across Asia and the Pacific in post-production techniques, processing and marketing to enable them to add value to their goods and get the best price
• Helped establish six farmers marketing associations in Egypt, with a total of 12,500 members, and provided substantial training and capacity-building that enabled more than 2,000 farmers to sign contracts with private-sector companies to sell 21 different crops
• Upgraded processing technologies and trained more than 900 entrepreneurs in business development and marketing in Ghana, resulting in cassava becoming a cash crop and being exported
• Led nearly 6,500 women to open savings accounts with private-sector operators and, over the past five years, more than 11,000 poor rural farmers to buy life insurance in Peru

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