Weitzenegger's Rural Economic Development Report

Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development (AIARD)
http://aiard.org
The Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development (AIARD) is an association of professionals and practitioners in international development with experience and intellectual and institutional capabilities to articulate and address broad-based as well as more focused development issues in agriculture and rural development.

EASYPol is an FAO on-line library
http://www.fao.org/easypol/output/
Interactive multilingual repository of downloadable resource materials for capacity development in policy making for food, agriculture and rural development. EASYPol is maintained by the FAO Agricultural Policy Support Service.

The Right to Food Virtual Library
http://www.fao.org/righttofood/kc/libraryen.htm
This Library is a unique repository of information on the Human Right to Adequate Food and Freedom from Hunger. It provides catalogued documentation to assist the implementation of the Right to Food at national level. The aim of the Right to Food Virtual Library is to collect, maintain and provide a relevant, up-to-date, and outstanding collection of documents to fulfill the information needs of policy makers, practitioners, general public, civil society, NGOs, UN country teams, media and the academia, working toward the realization of the Right to Food. The Virtual Library is also available on CD and free of charge.

India will host the first Global Agro-Industries Forum
http://www.gaif08.org
New Delhi, India, 8-11 April 2008.
FAO and the UNIDO together with the Government of India have joined forces to organize the first ever Global Agro-Industries Forum. It will promote dialogue on strategies for developing competitive agro-industries that contribute to poverty reduction. It will thus build on success stories and winning strategies to develop competitive agro-industries in the developing world that include small-scale farmers and reinforce collaboration among all stakeholders from local to global levels, as well as public and private sectors.

Case studies of lead firm governance systems in the context of commercialization of smallholder agriculture in Uganda
http://tinyurl.com/36u5sn
This study analyzes the governance of domestic value chains (DVCs) in the agricultural sector in Uganda. It focuses at exploring how agricultural produce buyers set up, coordinate and monitor - that is govern - the DVCs with their supplying farmers. Particularly how buyers govern the latter’s activities and performance and thus the division of labour in the DVC.

GTZ Reader: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Systems for Rural Development
http://www2.gtz.de/wbf/doc/en-Knowledge-Management-Reader-2007.pdf
Knowledge Management (KM) is a relatively novel management concept. It has been pushed by the rapid developments of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT facilitates a speedy exchange of data, information and documents. There is groupware for communication; content management systems to organise and retrieve documents; expert systems, data mining and text mining systems, tracing services and search engines, e.g. Google. Communication via email, fax, and phone- and video-conferences is ordinary business. It is good guessing that technological advances will continue to revolutionize the way we communicate and interact with each other.

GTZ-Reader: Knowledge Management and Knowledge Systems for Rural Development
http://www2.gtz.de/wbf/doc/en-Knowledge-Management-Reader-2007.pdf
Knowledge Management (KM) is a relatively novel management concept. It has been pushed by the rapid developments of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT facilitates a speedy exchange of data, information and documents. There is groupware for communication; content management systems to organise and retrieve documents; expert systems, data mining and text mining systems, tracing services and search engines, e.g. Google. Communication via email, fax, and phone- and video-conferences is ordinary business. It is good guessing that technological advances will continue to revolutionize the way we communicate and interact with each other. While the speed and ease to exchange data and information will increase, a new challenge for users emerges: to select relevant data, information and documents. To better understand potential and limitations it is importance to recognise the differences between data, information and knowledge.

From e&lr to Rural 21
http://www.rural-development.de/3070.0.html#01
The journal Rural 21 replaced entwicklung & ländlicher raum (e&lr) as of January 2008. The journal will have a new name, a new design and a completely revamped editorial concept. This step towards further internationalising the journal will make it accessible for an even greater readership, because Rural 21 will also incorporate the former English journal agriculture & rural development.

UN to Connect Rural Women Entrepreneurs through Online Knowledge Network
http://kn4womencoop.org
This web-based network will make it possible for women entrepreneurs to learn from each other about business opportunities, market trends, and to market their products. Membership in the knowledge network is open to women’s cooperatives, women’s business associations, non-governmental organizations and policymakers. Topics include: business basics, building life skills for women’s empowerment, forming cooperative enterprises, marketing, making business plans, costing and pricing, building e-businesses, and online payment and delivery systems.

World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development
http://go.worldbank.org/ZJIAOSUFU0
The WDR 2008 calls for placing the sector at the center of the development agenda if the goals of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 are to be realized. The last time a WDR on agriculture was published was in 1982, making this a landmark report that comes when many are calling for an African agricultural revolution. While 75 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas in developing countries, only 4 percent of official development assistance goes to agriculture. In Sub-Saharan Africa, a region heavily reliant on agriculture for overall growth, public spending for farming is also only 4 percent of total government spending and the sector is still taxed at relatively high levels. The report finds that for the, poorest people, GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth originating outside the sector. The ,authors argue that a dynamic ‘agriculture-for-development’ agenda can benefit the estimated 900 million rural people in the developing world who live on less than $1 a day, most of whom rely on agriculture for a living.

Rural Credit and Microenterprise Development
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/microfinance/rc/filedownload.do?itemId=1119420
This is a descriptive report by Bandeth Rosdrawn from various literature to indicate the roles of microcredit and microfinance in rural development. This is an assignment to fulfill one of my paper (International Rural Development Paper)

Rural employment and migration: In search of decent work
http://www.odi.org.uk/publications/briefing/bpruralemploymentoct07.pdf
This ODI Briefing Paper by Steve Wiggins and Priya Deshingkar looks at new thinking on rural employment which is needed to create more and better rural jobs. Growth in agriculture is essential, and growth in the rural non-farm economy is especially important. Job prospects improve as education, skills, health and early nutrition levels rise. Rural-urban migration (whether temporary or permanent) opens new opportunities and also helps tighten rural labour markets. With rising productivity and wages, it becomes easier to push for better labour standards, to reduce child labour and correct gender inequalities.

Community of Practice on Value Chains in Rural Development
http://www.sdc-valuechains.ch/
This SDC effort brings conceptualists and practitioners together, who are interested in both sharing and learning from experiences and ideas. Together we can find new insights and ways of working with value chains in rural development.

Private Sector Development in Rural Areas - Assessing the Applicability of PSD Instruments in Agricultural Economic Development - Discussion Paper
http://www2.gtz.de/wbf/doc/SVPWFPSDAED0607.pdf
The starting point of this MesoPartner paper is the observation that private sector development (PSD) and agricultural economic development (AED) have historically been two distinct approaches in development cooperation. Both looked at ways to promote productive development in developing countries. But they were based on different disciplines, they were founded on different concepts, they applied different instruments and tools, and they involved separate communities of practice. The current effort to redefine intervention strategies in African countries under the header of ''sustainable economic development” creates an opportunity to reflect on the two approaches. In this paper, the angle will be on contributions that PSD can make to AED.

Focal Point for Rural Development
http://www.sdc-ruraldevelopment.ch/index.php?userhash=1317698&lID=2&navID=47
The Swiss SDC Focal Point for Rural Development is an answer to the challenge of effectively managing knowledge, learning and joint work around rural development across sectors and thematic specialisations, and across globally dispersed programmes and partners.

The Rural Development News
http://www.agridea-international.ch/publications/ruraldevelopmentnews/index.htm
n information magazine for staff of development projects and programmes, co-operation offices, NGOs, consultants, information departments and all those interested in subjects related to rural development.

Enhancing the Value of Rural-Urban Links
http://www.ifpri.org/divs/fcnd/dp/fcndp195.htm
This paper examines how market institutions can affect links between urban and rural areas with specific emphasis on goods market integration in the national context.

Value Chains in the Agri-Food Sector;
http://www.sdc-valuechains.ch/resources/resourceen36.pdf
Jill E. Hobbs, Ann Cooney & Murray Fulton, 2000

Value Chain Management and Poverty Alleviation in Rural Areas:
Project Experience from Kyrgyzstan
http://www.sdc-valuechains.ch/resources/resourceen129.pdf
Helvetas 2005

Shaping Value Chains for Development: Global Value Chains in Agribusiness
http://www2.gtz.de/dokumente/bib/05-0280.pdf
By John Humphrey, GTZ

Value chains for a better integration of smallholders to trade - the case of chilli in Ghana
http://www2.gtz.de/dokumente/bib/06-1267.pdf
The objective of this study by Christin Schipmann is to compare international and national value chains with regard to potential benefits for smallholders and existing entry barriers to their integration. The research was carried out in the chilli sector of Ghana.

FAO Farm Management and Production Economics Service
http://www.fao.org/ag/ags/AGSP/activities.html
As one of four principal services of the Agricultural Support Systems Division, AGSP's mission is to improve planning and decision-making by farmers and people and organisations that provide support to farmers. AGSP is concerned with improvements in the profitablility, productivity and efficiency and competitiveness of farms and other agricultural business enterprises, and the promotion of sound decision making related to farm, enterprise and resource management and farming systems development.

Value Chain Partnerships for a Sustainable Agriculture
http://www.valuechains.org/
The goal of this Iowa State University project is to foster the growth of value chains that reward small and midsize farmers who follow production practices using the highest standards of environmental and community stewardship.

Participatory approaches to agroentreprise development
http://www.ciat.cgiar.org/agroempresas/ingles/index.htm#goodpractice
Three guides are provided by the CIAT, which presents the approaches they developed for the promotion of rural agro-entreprises.