Tackling rural poverty, together

Extract

The last decade has witnessed a transformation in the architecture of international development assistance driven by commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the introduction of country-led Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSs) and efforts to bring about increased alignment and harmonization of development assistance behind national development goals. During the period a variety of policy and aid approaches have been used in agriculture and rural development (A&RD) to accelerate progress towards more effective aid delivery and stronger results on the ground. The Sector-Wide Approach (SWAps) is one such approach.

The overall purpose of this study is to examine past, present and future roles of A&RD SWAps within the broader context of changes in development assistance. The specific objectives of this study are: (i) to establish whether, and in what ways, A&RD SWAps are delivering against their stated goals; and (ii) to identify critical lessons about the way in which development assistance currently supports the A&RD sector and what can be done differently to enhance the contribution of A&RD to long term growth and poverty reduction.

This study comprises three phases. Phase 1 is a desk review aimed at scoping out the global context for the move to SWAps in A&RD, reviewing lesions learned from the existing literature on the challenges SWAps are seeking to address and their performance record, and elaborating the preliminary conceptual framework with a view to guiding activities in the subsequent phases. This report documents the findings of Phase 1. In Sections 2 and 3 the focus is on the key principles underlying the evolution of the SWAp, and the context and experiences of implementing SWAps in general, and A&RD SWAps in particular. Section 4 focuses on a number of emerging issues and challenges relating to A&RD SWAps, Section 5 introduces a conceptual framework including SWAp country selection criteria and methodology for for taking forward Phase 2 of the study.