Sustainable livelihoods are among the most significant ways of addressing rural poverty, leading the poor to a productive life of dignity, self-worth and transformation.
Food and livelihood security for smallholder farmers is threatened by environmental factors, limited market access and population growth. Recent indications are that food production will have to be increased by 50–60% by 2050, when the world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion.
By addressing the many challenges of food, nutrition and livelihood insecurities, IIRR’s Food Security and Resilient Livelihoods program aims to end poverty for millions of poor and marginalized rural households throughout Asia and Africa. We enable communities to become more productive while ensuring that their practices are sustainable, intensifies agricultural productivity, improves household nutritional practices, diversifies livelihood sources, and protects the environment on which their livelihoods depend. IIRR works to ensure that communities and individuals have equitable access to resources, opportunities and are able to accumulate assets that can withstand adversity. We meet the growing needs of farmers, communities, entrepreneurs, women and youth by assisting them with sustainable practices, helping them link to markets and financial services, participate in value chains and build their capacity to increase assets and generate wealth.
Our strategy works to build a solid foundation for promoting climate change adaptation, biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Nowadays the linkages between poverty, food security, and nutrition are better understood as drivers of efforts to eradicate poverty among the most vulnerable and marginalized rural sectors.
Smallholder farms need to be more environmentally friendly, agro-ecologically sound, and economically productive. IIRR’s three decades of experience in testing, promoting, and sharing regenerative agriculture provides a variety of choices for a new focus on climate-smart agriculture (CSA). CSA addresses food and income security while helping reduce the carbon footprint of small farms and bringing tangible benefits to smallholder farmers and their communities.
IIRR’s livelihood resilience orientation recognizes that climate change will continue to mean more frequent and extreme weather events. Ways have to be found to manage risks and mitigate the impacts of climate shocks.
A degraded natural resource base increases the vulnerability of local communities to the impacts of drought, extreme rain, floods, and other natural disasters. Appropriate community-centered approaches, featuring strong learning elements, can help promote out-scaling of models for bringing about the needed transformation on a scale that has larger and more lasting impact.
Key to this theme is building strong farmer institutions, integrating them into competitive value chains, and simultaneously strengthening partnerships with the private sector to upscale their value chains.
Specific interventions include:
- Integrated family farms
- Bio Intensive Agriculture (BIG)
- Systems of Rice Intensification
- Organizing small holder producers into cooperatives, learning groups and producer associations
- Financial inclusion by linking them financial institutions
- Vegetable Oil Development
- Women Enterprise Development
- Agriculture Market Support
- Climate Smart Village Program
- Climate Smart Agriculture-Climate Smart Villages program