Context: Given the magnitude of the challenge presented by the COVID-19 crisis, IFAD has launched a multi-donor COVID-19 Rural Poor Stimulus Facility (RPSF).
Key Poits

• It is a short-term strategy that feeds into IFAD’s longer-term development objectives.
• IFAD will initiate the Facility with US$40 million of seed funding from grant resources and expects to mobilize at least US$200 million from Member States and other donors to scale up support.
• The Facility will leverage the UN Secretary-General’s Response and Recovery Fund and the work of other multilateral partners to achieve food security for the millions of poor rural people in the most remote and vulnerable communities.

Significance of this facility

• This initiative aligns with the UN socio-economic response framework and complements IFAD’s broader COVID-19 response efforts.
• It seeks to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods in the context of the crisis by ensuring timely access to inputs, information, markets and liquidity.

The planned interventions fall into four main categories:

• Providing inputs and basic assets for productionof crops, livestock and fisheries.
• Facilitating access to markets to support small-scale farmers in selling their products in conditions where market functions are restricted.
• Targeting funds for rural financial services to ensure sufficient liquidity and to ease repayment requirements so as to maintain services, markets and jobs.
• Promoting the use of digital services to deliver key information on production, weather, finance and markets.

Objectives

• It aims to improve the food security and resilience of poor rural people by supporting production, market access and employment.
• The ultimate goal of the RPSF is to accelerate the recovery of poor and vulnerable rural people from the COVID-19 crisis.

Eligibility

• All IFAD-supported country programmes that are at risk of not achieving their development outcomes due to COVID-19 are eligible to receive funding from the RPSF.
• Preference will be given to countries with low institutional and financial capacity to respond to the crisis.
• Ceiling amounts for countries and projects will be determined by the total amount of financing available.