Avoiding Risk For Poor Rural Households

Avoiding and managing risk is a prerequisite for poor rural households to move out of poverty, and it is thus to their livelihood strategies, ‘IFAD 2011 Rural Poverty Report’ revealed.

The report dubbed’ New realities, new challenges: new opportunities for tomorrow’s generation’ is  an in-depth study of rural poverty.

The findings in the report come from a collaboration among dozens of experts in the field of poverty reduction-both inside and outside IFAD. They also come from the poor rural people themselves.

At the household level, decisions about how to allocate and use cash, land and labour are a function not only of available opportunities.

IFAD: The State Of Rural Poverty Today

The population of the developing world is still more rural than urban: some 3.1 billion people or 55 percent of the total population, live in rural areas, according to International Development Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), 2011 report on rural poverty.

However, between 2020 and 2025, the total rural population will peak and then start to decline, and the developing world’s urban population will overtake its rural population, the report added.

The report cited Latin America  and the Caribbean, and the East and South East Asia where the number of rural people is already in decline.

Elsewhere, the growth of rural populations is slowing, while numbers will start to decline around 2025 in the Middle East and North Africa and in South and Central Asia, and around 2045 in sub-Saharan Africa.