Three Things for IFAD President Alvaro Lario to Focus on for the success of IFAD-13

The impacts of climate change and increasing hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity in low-income countries make the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) ’s role in the multilateral system—of inclusive rural development—as crucial today as when it was founded 45?years ago.

IFAD has a unique role in the multilateral system with a dual-mandate as both a UN specialised agency and an International Finance Institution (IFI) that supports marginalised rural communities. Since the arrival of IFAD’s president, Alvaro Lario in late 2022, IFAD has been working toward its 13th replenishment of its resources, IFAD-13. IFAD-13, which will be implemented between 2025 and 2027, recalibrates the organisation’s focus in three key areas. It will support resilient rural livelihoods and food systems to focus more on fragile contexts, invest more in biodiversity and climate resilience for small-scale producers, and engage more with the #privatesector and a renewed commitment to ?the UN's Leave No One Behind agenda.

IFAD’s global relevance and ambition is to be applauded. IFAD’s strategy and focus is directly relevant to urgent global challenges.

Over the last five years, IFAD has done a great job in quickly responding to external environmental challenges such as #COVID19 and #climatechange and has developed inclusive and tailored country strategies—giving voice in decision making with partner countries and local communities. The 2024 MOPAN assessment of IFAD is strong and positive. In this assessment, IFAD achieved satisfactory or highly satisfactory ratings for 11 out the 12 of MOPAN ’s key performance indicators of organisational performance and effectiveness.

As a Network that has conducted 100+ assessments of nearly 40 different multilateral organisations in the past 20 years, MOPAN members commissioned the assessment of IFAD and published the findings after a launch event, yesterday, at IFAD headquarters, in Rome. The assessment lauded the organisation for its responsive and transparent approach to global needs and member’s wishes as well as improvements since its last assessment in 2018. It also identified key areas for IFAD to focus on to maxmise its results and support IFAD-13’s success.

With a year and some change at the head of IFAD, Mr Lario, has a much to look forward to as the organisation embarks on a new chapter but there are still challenges that could limit IFAD-13’s success. Some insights — drawing from the MOPAN assessment — on three key challenges facing IFAD in this transformational moment:

1. Improving project efficiency: Improving disbursement rates and minimising implementation delays will help IFAD to reach and meet the needs of rural farming communities more quickly. ?IFAD needs to carefully reflect on appropriate ways of enhancing efficiency such as working closely with and developing capacity within partner governments.
2. Increasing budget allocation to critical activities such as country programme development and design: This will support the success of programmes and ensure country programmes are inclusive, reflect voices and needs of partner countries and rural communities.
3. Prioritising based on IFAD’s mandate and comparative advantage: IFAD has an important mandate and is responding to critical global challenges. To maximise success, it is important that the organisation carefully prioritises within programmes, strategic partnerships, and organisational decision in ways that reflect IFAD’s comparative advantage and resources.

As IFAD heads towards IFAD-13, its success will greatly be enhanced by addressing these three main areas. They will enable IFAD to deliver on its commitment to inclusive and sustainable rural development and #investinruralpeople.

For further MOPAN findings on IFAD, visit: bit.ly/MOPAN_IFAD

#MOPANonIFAD #foodsecurity #LeaveNoOneBehind #globalgoals #climatechange #InvestInRuralPeople