India inks credit agreement with IFAD for Jharkhand Tribal Empowerment Livelihood Project (JTLEP)

October 8, 2013

India signed an agreement for credit of $ 51 million (equivalent) from IFAD for the Jharkhand Tribal Empowerment Livelihood Project (JTLEP). JTELP would continue till September 2021.

What is JTLEP?

The Jharkhand Tribal Empowerment Livelihood Project (JTLEP) aims to enable rural households to take-up sustainable livelihood opportunities. The project shall benefit small rural producers, women, scheduled caste households and youth in the hill districts of the State of the Jharkhand. The goal of the project is to reduce poverty in the hill districts of the State of Jharkhand. Jharkhand has a population of 33 million, of whom 26% are members of scheduled tribes and 78% are rural. The project will be implemented in 14 districts in the state, focusing on approximately 30 sub-districts that have a rural tribal population of more than 50% and at least half the population living below the poverty line. The new project has four main components:

Community Empowerment
Integrated Natural Resource Management
Livelihood Project
Project Management.

What is IFAD?

IFAD or International Fund for Agricultural Development is a specialized agency of the United Nations which works for the eradication of rural poverty and improve food security by means of financial services, markets, technology, land and other natural resources.

Background:

It was established in 1977 following the 1974 World Food Conference. The conference was organized in response to the food crises of the early 1970s that primarily affected the Sahelian countries of Africa. It resolved that “an International Fund for Agricultural Development should be established immediately to finance agricultural development projects primarily for food production in the developing countries.” The conference agreed that the causes of food insecurity and famine were not so much failures in food production but structural problems relating to poverty, and to the fact that the majority of the developing world’s poor populations were concentrated in rural areas.

Goal

IFAD’s goal is to empower poor rural women and men in developing countries to achieve higher incomes and improved food security.

Objectives

IFAD will ensure that poor rural people have better access to, and the skills and organization they need to take advantage of:

Natural resources, especially secure access to land and water, and improved natural resource management and conservation practices
Improved agricultural technologies and effective production services
A broad range of financial services
Transparent and competitive markets for agricultural inputs and produce
Opportunities for rural off-farm employment and enterprise development
Local and national policy and programming processes

Note: Global poverty remains a massive and predominantly rural phenomenon – with 70% of the developing world’s 1.4 billion extremely poor people living in rural areas.

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