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Social protection has helped lift millions of people out of extreme poverty.  However, seventy percent of the world population, particularly in rural areas, still lack social protection coverage. Benjamin Davis, Strategic Programme Leader ad interim of the FAO Strategic Programme on Rural Poverty Reduction together with Natalia Winder Rossi, Social Protection Team Leader of the FAO Social Policies and Rural Institutions Division explain how enhancing social protection systems in rural areas can contribute to reducing poverty and ending hunger. They describe the FAO policy work, including key policy messages. See all videos in the Policy and Governance series :  AR  CH  EN [...]

This brochure describes FAO's area of work on on facilitating the implementation of Article 14 of CEDAW for rural women's empowerment and food security under Strategic Objective 1 implemented by the Cross Cutting Theme on Gender. The brochure contains a rational for why it is important to address gender inequalities for food security and nutrition through political commitment and by incorporating the perspective of gender equality and the empowerment of rural women in sectoral and cross-sectoral policies and strategies. It then describes what FAO can do to support its Member Countries to comply with CEDAW and thus to formulate gender-equitable [...]

Uganda is putting significant efforts toward addressing the constraints responsible for its low agricultural productivity, which affects farmers’ incomes and therefore, their food security. The biggest developments are being seen in improving the added value of its production, as well as in supporting strategic commodities such as livestock and rice. 

The National Inputs Voucher Scheme (NAIVS) will be ending at the close of this cropping year (2013/2014). NAIVS provided access to fertilizer and seeds through subsidized input packages for maize and rice. The Big Results Now (BRN) initiative was launched in 2013, which aims to modernize the agriculture sector by promoting public-private partnership and mainstream market oriented measures.

From 2003, the Zero Hunger Program and subsequently, in 2011, the Brazil Without Poverty Plan, marked a deliberate convergence of the purposes and actions focused on farmers and family farmers in Brazil. This allowed simultaneous access to social policies and polices focused on agriculture and livestock activities, through a permanent set of public policies, such as rural credit, climate and income insurance, technical assistance and commercialization. This happened in parallel to affirmative actions related to gender, ethnicity and rural youth. To deal with such complex themes such as eradicating hunger and extreme poverty, the Federal Government began to integrate traditionally [...]

The video shows the results and impacts the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme is having in Ghana. LEAP is a cash transfer programme for the poorest families in Ghana to reduce poverty and enhance long term human development. LEAP is managed by Ghana's Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection. The University of North Carolina and the Institute for Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana carried out the impact evaluation, in conjunction with UNICEF and FAO's PtoP team.

This document offers a methodological introduction to Social Accounting Matrices (SAMs) for analysing socio-economic impact of agricultural and rural development policies. Firstly, the concept and the structure of an SAM are presented. Next, the concept of policy "instrument" and "objective" variables are introduced and applied for SAM-based policy impact analysis. The module concludes by discussing the multipliers matrix as an instrument for analysing policy impact and presenting some examples. This paper is part of the FAO Policy series: EASYPol-Resources for policy making (in agriculture, rural development and food security). You can find other EASYPol series' resources in the Resources section of [...]

This paper sketches prevailing development paradigms, i.e. the definition of modalities to achieve development, based on either a codified set of activities and/or based on a vision regarding the functioning and evolution of a socio-economic system.  The exercise intends to contribute to the interpretation of recent past and ongoing development processes and policies and to support the exploration of alternative development paradigms to address emerging and future development issues. This paper is part of the FAO Policy series: EASYPol-Resources for policy making (in agriculture, rural development and food security). To find other EASYPol series' resources, go to the Policy Support and Governance [...]

This paper reviews rural women’s access to financial services, a key factor of successful rural development strategies. Designing appropriate financial products for women to be able to save, borrow and insure is essential to strengthen women’s role as producers and widen the economic opportunities available to them. For this purpose it is essential to understand how context-specific legal rights, social norms, family responsibilities and women’s access to and control over other resources shape their need for capital and their ability to obtain it. The paper argues that it is important that development strategies that aim to boost rural women’s productive [...]

After sketching the mutual links between economic growth, agriculture, technology, poverty reduction and external factors, this paper analyses the implications of recent international price shocks on welfare and growth, notably energy and agricultural products, for Burkina Faso, a less industrialised, low-income, food-deficit, net oil-importing country. The socio-economic impacts of the above-mentioned external shocks are analysed by means of a Computable General Equilibrium model (CGE). The paper also discusses the extent to which technological changes in agriculture, specifically the introduction of “Good Agricultural Practices” (GAP) towards “conservation agriculture”, could mitigate the welfare and growth losses derived by international price shocks.  Additionally, it is shown [...]