Events

The high-level event, Transforming food systems: Implications for coordination and financing, introduced the upcoming Food Systems Summit and raised key issues related to the Action Tracks, and explored their implications for donors.

From 19-21 June, the 2019 Annual General Assembly (AGA) brought together more than 40 participants, Platform members and partners, in Zurich/Maennedorf, Switzerland. After many years of thematically focused AGAs, this year’s edition was conceptualised as an inward-focused Members‘ retreat, intended to inspire members to reflect on and leverage their unique strengths in the rural development space, in particular in light of a thoroughly changing environment.

Connecting the dots: employment, youth empowerment and development effectiveness in the rural space. The tone of the thematic discussions of the second day of the AGA 2018 was set by the keynote speech about “Strategic Framing of Youth Empowerment – What is needed in the future?”. The links between the future of agriculture, the transformation of rural areas and the commitment of the donor and development community to enable young people to live a decent and meaningful life were the focus of the two-panel discussions during the high-level forum. First, the focus was on the young farmers and the decent rural employment.

The Global Donor Platform for Rural Development organised its AGA 2018, "Young and ready to move - empowering the new generation in the rural space", with the support of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). The background to the thematic discussions was the Rural Youth Employment Initiative, to which governments and heads of states voted on at the G20 summit in 2017. This historic vote signalled a clear political commitment of the international community to improve the efforts to empower youth in rural areas.