Scaling Up the Fight Against Rural Poverty - FIDAfrique

Allocating IFAD’s loan funds: IFAD allocates its loan funds across countries according to a formula
under a process known as “Performance-based Allocation System” (PBAS). The formula includes
weighted factors for (a) size of rural population, (b) Gross National Income per capita, and (c) country
performance (combining three indexes: IFAD projects at risk, rural sector performance and IDA
resource allocation index). One option for providing borrowing countries and IFAD’s managers a
signal that scaling up matters, is to include an indicator in the PBAS which reflects IFAD’s track
record in the country in supporting the scaling up of successful programs. The justification for doing
so would be that the impact of IFAD’s engagement per dollar lent is clearly greater in countries where
it implements a successful scaling up strategy. However, adding another such factor would have only a
small impact on country allocations, due to the heavy weight given to the factor reflecting the size of
the rural poor population. Hence, a better option might be to explore the use of IFAD’s grant facility to
allocate funding in support of scaling initiatives as mentioned earlier.
Allocating IFAD’s administrative budget: We did not probe into the details of IFAD’s administrative
budget processes. From our interviews with budget and operational managers it appears that scaling up
is not currently a factor reflected in the budget allocation decisions. Budget allocations are powerful
signals of institutional priorities. Therefore, it would be appropriate to explore how country
performance in scaling up can be incorporated in the annual allocations by region and country,
presumably using the same scaling up performance indicator as suggested earlier (see previous
paragraph on the PBAS related options).
Managing loan numbers and size: IFAD faces a tension between restraining the growth of its
administrative costs and putting more budgetary resources into its operational work as it aims to scale
up. One way to resolve this tension is to keep down the number of loans while increasing loan size, as
overall loanable resources increase with – hopefully – rising replenishments for IFAD. Since
administrative costs are usually measured in relation to total loan commitments, budget allocations per
project can increase as loan amounts increase without raising the share of administrative costs. Larger
loan amounts per project will also help IFAD in pursuing its scaling up agenda. 44
3. Changing IFAD’s core values to include scaling up
Hartmann and Linn (2007) concluded from their review of the evidence on scaling up that ultimately
scaling up is about the values and mindset of the people engaged in development and development
assistance. IFAD has a concise and cogent statement of its core values. It explicitly refers to
“innovation”. 45 As such the statement reflects IFAD’s success in recent years in turning the mindset of
IFAD’s staff to seriously focus on innovation. A small, but useful step would be to include in IFAD’s
core value statement an explicit reference to the goal of scaling up. More importantly, IFAD’s Board
and managers would need to sign on to a fundamental shift in mindset and orientation and share this
with all of IFAD’s staff – and ultimately all of IFAD’s partners on the ground – so that for every rural
poverty intervention that IFAD supports two questions are asked as standard practice: “Is this
intervention scaling up our prior experience and/or that of others?” and “If this intervention works,
should it and how could it be scaled up?”
44 One staff member of a regional division commented that larger loan and project size may require different
management methods compared with those used for IFAD’s traditionally relatively small loans. This will have to
be monitored.
45 IFAD, “IFAD’s core values”. http://www.ifad.org/governance/values/index.htm
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