Scaling Up the Fight Against Rural Poverty - FIDAfrique

Foreword
IFAD has long recognized that its needs to be a catalyst, if it is to succeed in achieving its mandate to
contribute significantly to rural poverty reduction in developing countries. Over the last decade we
have stressed innovation, knowledge and scaling up as key elements of our approach. For many years
we saw our role principally as an innovator in searching for and testing new solutions for the rural
poor, but we always knew that innovation without generating knowledge of what works and building
on this knowledge by scaling up successful interventions are critical. We therefore were pleased to
find that the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings was ready to prepare an institutional
scaling up review for IFAD to help us towards a better understanding how we function as a scaling up
institution.
Rather than representing a formal evaluation using well a well-established methodology, this review
was intended to serve as a learning experience for us as well as for the Wolfensohn Center team. It was
the first institutional scaling up review ever carried out to our knowledge and hence served as a pilot
for such an undertaking. We gave the team total freedom to review all relevant documentation, talk to
managers and staff, to review our programs on the ground and meet with local stakeholders in selected
countries. We expected to receive an informative, independent and fair assessment and actionable
recommendations. We also expected that the exercise would serve as an example for other aid
organizations that might similarly want to review their own approaches to scaling up their successful
programs.
This report is the result of the work of the Wolfensohn Center team after one year of in-depth work.
We at IFAD feel that our expectations have been fully met and that the results were well worth our
effort and the financial support we were able to offer the Wolfensohn Center. We have reviewed,
discussed and commented on the report in detail. Not everyone in IFAD will agree with everything the
report says about our activities nor do we necessarily agree with all the recommendations. But then
that was not the purpose of the exercise. We feel the review gives us an excellent starting point for our
internal efforts to further strengthen IFAD’s effectiveness as a catalyst in our pursuit of helping to
eradicate rural poverty around the globe. We also believe it represents an great example of the kind of
review that aid organizations more generally should be carrying out if they want to turn themselves
into effective scaling up institutions. We look forward to sharing out experience with others.
I want to thank the team from the Wolfensohn Center for their contribution. I also want to thank my
colleagues at IFAD for their understanding of the importance of the scaling up agenda, for their
support of this review, and for contributing their time, insights and comments throughout the
preparation of the report. Special thanks are due to Cheikh Sourang for shepherding the study
effectively from start to finish.
Kevin Cleaver, Associate Vice President, IFAD
Rome, August 2010.
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