Tackling rural poverty, together

A joint donor initiative

Our ultimate goal is to reduce poverty and promote economic growth in rural areas in developing countries, as reflected in our Mission Statement:

Three quarters of the world's extremely poor people — 800 million out of 1.1 billion men, women and children — live in rural areas. They depend on agriculture and other rural jobs for their livelihoods. Effective aid for rural development is thus fundamental to poverty reduction (for more information, please refer to The challenge we face).

Since the creation of the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development in 2004 (please also refer to the Platform Flyer), major bilateral and multilateral development agencies are united in a coordinated endeavour to get the rural development agenda right. We have been jointly working to improve aid effectiveness — in line with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005) and the Rome Declaration on Harmonisation (2003) — and we seek to enhance coordination, communication and shared learning between all development partners by:

• Formulating common donor policies,
• Reducing the duplication of effort and improving mutual understanding between all development partners,
• Advising how harmonisation and alignment can make agriculture and rural development initiatives more effective.

What we do

Our activities are standing on three strong pillars (for detailed information on our activities, please refer to Our work):

I: Advocacy and Outreach

We aim to ensure that the needs and opportunities of the rural poor are appropriately addressed in policy debates at international, regional and national levels.

II: Shared Learning

We aim to raise the quality and heighten the impact of rural development investment by collecting and disseminating useful innovation and thought-leadership.

We are striving to identify and close information gaps and improve systematic lesson-learning with all rural-development stakeholders.

III: Aid Effectiveness

We work on the ground in several developing countries, including Nicaragua, Burkina Faso and Cambodia, to help translate the Paris Declaration into practical reality.

We provide collaborative support to the harmonisation and alignment of procedures and practices in rural development in line with the Paris Declaration.

We aim to enhance donor coordination and alignment to African countries’ strategies with respect to CAADP.

We work on the ground in several developing countries, including Nicaragua, Burkina Faso and Cambodia, to help translate the Paris Declaration into practical reality.

How we operate

Our central decision-making body is the Board – headed by the Platform Chairman and consisting of the Focal Points of all full Members. Currently these are the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom (DFID), the Directorate-General for Development of the European Commission (EC-DG DEV), the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MFA-F), the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), the United States Agency for International Cooperation (USAID) and the World Bank (WB).

The Board meets at least once a year to consider the long-term strategy of the Platform and to approve its annual budget, the annual work programme and the proposed activities to be financed from the Platform Trust Fund which holds the financial contributions of the Platform Members.

The Steering Committee consists of the Platform Vice-Chairman – acting as Chairman of the Steering Committee – and five Board members who are designated ad personam by the Board for a three-year period.

The Steering Committee’s main responsibility is to guide and supervise the day-to-day activities of the Platform Secretariat. It currently consists of the Focal Points of CIDA, DFID, EC-DG DEV, FAO (Chairman), MFA-F and the World Bank.

The Secretariat is the central management unit of the Platform and is currently hosted by the BMZ in Bonn, Germany, and managed by the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ).

We are building on the knowledge and experience of 9 Member Organisations and 22 Associate Member Organisations. Each of our Member and Associate Member Organisations appoints a Focal Point who is representing his/her organisation within the Platform network, actively participating in the formulation of joint policies, contributing to shared learning and speaking on behalf of the Platform at international events.

Furthermore we are engaged in partnerships with 8 research institutions, global and regional networks and other global initiatives in agriculture and rural development.