Sida and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), together with the Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative (SIANI) welcome you to a seminar to explore this topic. The seminar will include the presentation of the IFAD 2016 Rural Development Report: Fostering inclusive rural development.
The change across world’s cities and rural areas is obvious, constant and rapid. Growing demand for food, driven by population growth and rising incomes, creates opportunities and challenges for people working in rural areas, including in smallholder agriculture and the non-farm economy.
Rural development is one of the most effective ways to overcome rural poverty and to bridge the gap between rural and urban realities. Rural development has a direct impact on incomes and food and nutrition security. Agenda 2030 explicitly recognizes the central role an inclusive rural development plays for sustainable development.
Smallholders are still dominating agricultural systems in developing countries and they produce most of our food. However, they also face long-standing barriers to accessing resources, technology, inputs, finance, knowledge and markets. Rural areas need to be transformed to enable rural people to capitalize on changes in the world around them, rather than further marginalizing by them. Rural transformation is therefore a critical component of inclusive sustainable development as a whole, and in all its dimensions – social, economic and environmental.