Rural Development

The Millennium Development Goals, aimed at halving the incidence of world poverty by 2015 relative to 1990, form a framework for international action to tackle the world's development challenges. Since the majority of the world's poor live in rural areas, one must look to rural development for potentially tangible contributions to poverty reduction.

  

Rural development is about improving the well-being of rural people in a broad sense of the term. Typically, rural development programmes, therefore, address a range of needs, including alphabetisation and capacity building, infrastructure, community organisation, enterprise support, financial services, and services in agriculture, marketing, and natural resource management. The aim is to create employment and raise incomes while bettering other indicators of development as well. The task is challenging and complex, and for this reason, a fair share of projects in the past have failed.

 

In agriculture-based countries, including most of Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture and its associated industries are essential to growth and to reducing poverty and food insecurity. Using agriculture as the basis for economic growth in these countries requires a productivity revolution in smallholder farming.

 

In transforming countries, which include most of South and East Asia and North Africa, rapidly rising rural-urban income disparities and continuing extreme rural poverty are major sources of social and political tensions. Addressing these problems requires a comprehensive approach that pursues multiple pathways out of poverty – shifting to high-value agricultural products, increasing nonfarm employment and providing assistance to help move people out of agriculture.

 

Rural households pursue portfolios of farm and nonfarm activities that allow them to capitalize on the different skills of individual members and to diversify risks. Pathways out of poverty can be through improvements in smallholder farming, wage employment in agriculture or rural nonfarm activities, and migration out of rural areas – or some combination thereof. The World Development Report 2008 defines a development agenda based on a combination of four policy objectives, as shown below. In the process, empowering rural communities (to enhance their human capital and competitiveness), economic diversification (to increase income sources), microfinance (to improve access to credit) and risk management are important aspects to be addressed.

 

 

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