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This video tells the story of Mehaou, an inspiring Nigerien farmer and grandmother who has overcome many challenges to provide for her family - including rearing, breeding and selling goats.  FAO and the ASTF fund are supporting small farmers to invest and diversity their incomes to create decent employment opportunities. 

The paper discusses the role that social protection can play in saving livelihoods while also enhancing the capacity of households to respond, cope and withstand threats and crises. The paper builds on FAO Social Protection Framework (FAO, 2017) and focuses on the role of social protection systems in humanitarian contexts, with a closer look at protracted crises and a discussion on the importance of shock-sensitive and responsive systems, even in stable contexts. The paper acknowledges that strengthening resilience at national and community levels requires a multisector approach, where risk-informed social protection interventions, including cash transfers, can become a critical component.The paper [...]

Measuring food insecurity through people's experiences The Voices of the Hungry project has launched a tool called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) which can be used to gather information about the adequacy of people’s access to food by asking them directly about their experiences. National institutions can use the FIES to obtain data-based evidence about the distribution and severity of food insecurity that contributes to building political will and implementing policies to effectively realize the human right to adequate food.    

FAO helps countries achieve SDG1 (No poverty) and SDG2 (Zero hunger) by improving the livelihoods of poor and extreme poor rural people, including smallholders and family farmers.

The document follows the agenda of the workshop. It starts with a background description of the situation that has lead to the organization of the technical event. It sets the scene presenting the FAO's strategy on Rural Poverty Reduction and on Social Protection. It starts then with the policy review and the national Priorities presenting the learnings from the Republic of Egypt, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The second part treats the expanding of Social Protection to Rural Areas, presenting the experiences from Leabnon and the expansion of universal health to rural areas. The [...]

The FAO Country Profiles collects information from the entire FAO website and provides a fast and reliable way to access country-specific information with no need to search through individual databases and systems. It also includes a direct link to the Country website for in-depth information.

While there has been an unprecedented achievement in poverty reduction in the last three decades, eradicating extreme poverty and halving poverty by 2030 are still two of our greatest challenges. Today, about 767 million people continue to live in extreme poverty. Roughly, two thirds of the extreme poor live in rural areas, and the majority are concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In the past 30 years, private and public investments in agriculture and rural areas have remained stagnant or have declined in most developing countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where poverty and hunger are most [...]

The institution of community fisheries (CFi) organizations in Cambodia provides an interesting case for the empowerment of small-scale fisheries. The document pulls together findings from two activities carried out in the context of the development and implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) in Cambodia. These activities aimed at gaining a better understanding of the small-scale fisheries sector in Cambodia in general, with particular emphasis on the functioning of the CFi. Part 1 documents a national consultation process on small-scale fisheries which took place in 2012 [...]

This brief brings together the critical mass of evidence emerging from recent rigorous impact evaluations of government-run cash transfer programmes in seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These assessments have been developed under the PtoP initiative, led by FAO and UNICEF in partnership with national governments and research organizations.

For smallholder agriculture to prosper and transform itself, access to rural services is essential. Rural services that enable smallholders to overcome constraints to increase their productivity, manage their farms as a sustainable business, link to inputs and outputs markets and act collectively to improve their livelihoods are a first line of action to reduce rural poverty. Undoubtedly, improving rural services has long been on the development agenda. Yet, ensuring equitable access to rural services remains a challenge that governments and their development partners need to address to improve rural livelihoods and overcome rural poverty. The pluralistic Market-Oriented Services (MOS) programme [...]