International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)

This document is an overview of the lessons learned from an IFAD project on scaling up rural youth access to inclusive financial services for entrepreneurship and employment implemented in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. It contributes to shaping regional policy dialogues and strategies for supporting youth integration in the rural development space and will inform the design of future youth projects in IFAD.

This report analyses global, regional and national pathways of rural transformation, and suggests four categories into which most countries and regions fall, each with distinct objectives for rural development strategies to promote inclusive rural transformation: to adapt, to amplify, to accelerate, and a combination of them.

Rural youth development focuses on three mutually-reinforcing factors: productivity, connectivity, and agency. The IFAD 2019 Rural Development Report creates a roadmap for development strategies that incorporate a focus on rural youth. 

This report focuses on the importance of youth for rural development, constraints that they face, and how to embed rural youth policy and investments in broader rural development strategies.

This toolkit explains to practitioners what participatory tools are available for rapid market problem diagnosis, socioeconomic, and gender targeting and how to analyze the information, and how to use the findings in designing, implementing and evaluating projects.