Context
Rural areas in partner countries offer an enormnous development potentials, in particular with regard to food security and poverty reduction. Next to problems such as migration from rural areas and degradation of natural resources, climate change constitutes an additional challenge. The current political focus on the global supply of healthy food for the constantly growing world population is offering new opportunities for rural areas after years of marginalisation of this de-velopment potential.
The Paris Declaration of 2005 and the follow-up process (Accra 2008, Busan 2011, Mexico 2014) and also the commitmments made at the G8-Summit in L’Aquila build the decisive political and strategic benchmark for international engagement in agriculture, rural development and food security, particularly with regard to finance and investments. However, an improvement of the impact orientation for better coordination and governance structure remains one of the central tasks of the donor community in spite of the progress made.
The resulting core problem: The effectiveness of measures of the donor community in many countries is being reduced due to inadequatly coordinated agrarian policies, rural development strategies and investment plans between national and international partners in agriculture and rural development.
Development Objective
Founded in 2003 as an informal network, the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development (Platform) has as its development obejctive to raise ODA financing in the area of agriculture, rural development and food security and improve the effectiveness of corresponding policies, strategies, measures and investment plans.
The sectoral project supports this objective by facilitating the internal information and knowledge exchange and by promoting the external joint engagement in agriculture and rural development.
Approach
The sectoral project is oriented towards international and national goals and strategies. Especially important were the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 1 und 7, which are currently being replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the agreements on financing for development in the Post-2015 era.
The sectoral project is based on the BMZ sector concept „ Development of Rural Areas and its Contribution to Food Security(2010)" and on the BMZ special initiative "A World without Hunger".
The Platform applies a variety of communication instruments and work on various thematic are-as (www.donorplatform.org).
Impacts
The position papers and publications prepared by the sectoral project are effectively taken into account as references for policy and strategy development in international cooperation and used to increase the visibility of agriculture and rural development topics. The Sectoral Project improves the coordination and communication between Platform members and contributes to capacity building of decision makers in this policy area. The cooperation between important bilateral and international institutions helps the Platform to build synergies and supports the implementation of jointly elaborated strategies on a broad scale.
Sectoral projects have the task to advise and support BMZ in technical terms and support the bilateral policy development. In comparison to bilateral projects in partner countries, the im-pacts of sectoral projects on development are indirect.