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Today, about 783 million people live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is primarily a rural phenomenon, with 80 percent of the extreme poor living in rural areas, across greatly diverse rural landscapes. Despite great progress in poverty reduction, the standard of living of the poorest of the poor has remained almost unchanged in the past 35 years, signaling that a huge gap in policy making and programmatic approaches are leaving them behind.  FAO has established a Corporate Framework on Rural Extreme Poverty to orient and bring to bear the relevant work of the Organization towards reaching Target 1.1 of the SDGs. [...]

With the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, FAO’s mandate has been reinforced and scaled up to a depth and scope that calls for a greater commitment in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Much still needs to be done in order to mobilize sufficient resources and support to meet the global necessities related to the eradication of hunger, malnutrition and poverty globally. Deepening our engagement with key resource partners and fostering new alliances with like-minded players is essential for generating real and far-reaching impact on the ground. This report provides a comprehensive overview of France's partnership [...]

This course is the first in the Rural Poverty Reduction series, and provides an overview of rural poverty, and why it is so important to overcome it in rural contexts. The course describes the key concepts and definitions of rural poverty and how it can be measured, its drivers and cross-cutting themes. Finally, it considers the connection with gender issues and the way that gender shapes the way poverty is experienced by rural people.

The Development Law Service has been collaborating with the International Bar Association (IBA) for a few years now, in legal research and capactiy development in areas of common interest. This year, the IBA will hold its Annual conference in Rome in early October 2018 and LEGN will take part in the panel discussion of the Agricultural Law Committee of the IBA. The topic of this year's discussion is responsible investments in agriculture, and what lawyers need to know about the VGGT and the CFS-RAI principles, when they are advising their clients on large scale agricultural land investments in the exercise [...]

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and smart contracts provide a unique opportunity to bring greater efficiency, transparency and traceability to the exchange of value and information in the agriculture sector. By utilising digital records, cryptography and the disintermediation of transaction processing and data storage, DLTs can improve both agricultural supply chains and rural development interventions in a number of ways. The technology has the potential to simplify and integrate agricultural supply chains, enhance food safety, facilitate access to trade finance and other types of agricultural financial services, improve market transparency, provide greater legal certainty to land-tenure systems and strengthen accountability for [...]

Asia and the Pacific is experiencing major demographic shifts and urbanizing rapidly. E-agriculture technologies (remote sensing, drones, sensors) are emerging, with potentially profound implications for the entire food system and management of the natural resource base. Structural transformation of the economy has also changed the nature of the food security problem. Earlier, many governments thought that producing more staple food was sufficient to improve food security. However, today’s economy, increasingly based on human capital and less on physical strength, requires that policies and programmes promote healthy diets for healthy people. This need for improved nutrition will require shifts in agricultural [...]

This brochure presents FAO's sustained and consistent work towards gender equality and the empowerment of rural women, which are at the core of the Organization's efforts to end hunger, malnutrition and rural poverty. FAO recognizes the potential of rural women and men in achieving food security and improving nutrition and is committed to working with partners and strengthening its efforts to eliminate the gender inequalities that undermine the performance of the agriculture sector. Also available in Chinese, French, Spanish and Russian. 

Latin America and the Caribbean is falling short of the Sustainable Development Goal 1: Ending poverty. After two and a half decades of progress, poverty and extreme rural poverty increased by two percentage points each between 2014 and 2016. By 2017, there were an estimated 59 million poor and 27 million extreme poor in rural areas of the region. During the last 20 years, Latin America and the Caribbean has been at the forefront of global experiences in the reduction of rural poverty. The new regional context implies that the countries of the region must not only protect the progress made [...]

The Partnership note aims at providing readers with an overview of the work carried out by the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – one of the largest organizations of informal workers in the world– in bolstering financial inclusion for poor women, both in India (where SEWA is based) and abroad. The four-decade experience that SEWA can boast in providing financial services to poor women around the world - together with the unique financial innovations that the organization has developed through trial-and-error for its members - make SEWA an extremely interesting case study within the domain of development finance.

Social protection is the set of policies and programmes aimed at preventing or protecting all people against poverty, vulnerability, and social exclusion throughout their lifecycles, particularly the most vulnerable groups. This poster will serve to demonstrate the efforts - and advancements made - in reducing rural poverty and increasing resilience through FAO strategic programmes, such as SP3 and SP5 in recent years. It aims to provide to donors, partners, and policy-makers with the information they need to gain awareness of the impacts of social protection initiatives, and to invest in social protection as a valid pathway out of poverty and [...]