IFAD, ILO and IFRTD team up!

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (www.ifad.org) recently carried out a comprehensive internal rural transport review, which brought to light that despite signficant investments in rural infrastructure its overall performance has been unsatisfactory. This was due to a lack of an institutional integral strategy to rural transport and agriculture as well as a strong focus on building roads rather than a holistic approach to transport, including regular maintenance and Intermediate Means of Transport.

In efforts to improve the rural transport performance within IFAD, the ILO, IFRTD and IFAD jointly organised a two-day workshop in Rome on 24-25 of June. The overall aim of the workshop was to mobilise support for IFAD's investments in rural transport as well as to establish the basis of institutionalising such support within IFAD. Attended by representatives from the global Transport Knowledge Partnership, World Food Programme, World Bank, ITT, and Transport Research Laboratories as well as ILO, the IFRTD Secretariat and IFAD's country programme managers, the workshop offered many opportunities to learn, share and exchange knowledge, experiences and best practices.  

For more background information and a full workshop report please click here.  One of the main outcomes of the workshop is the strong demand from IFAD's country programme managers for support in design, implementation and supervision of their rural transport investments through capacity building services and knowledge management. To this end IFRTD and ILO have in principle agreed on a partnership to firstly provide capacity building services to their rural transport programmes in the short term and secondly to institutionalise rural transport within IFAD overall in the longer term. The first phase of the partnership will be launched in a limited number of countries in Sub-sahara Africa amongst others Rwanda and Congo-Brazzaville.  

Potentially there may be opportunities for consultants originating and based in the region to provide rural transport technical support. If you are interested and have the following qualifications please send your CV including references to ifrtd(at)ifrtd.org before August 31, 2008. Please write IFAD Consultancy Opportunity in the subject header.

•  A proven track record in either rural transport design/planning, implementation and/or policy dialogue
• Experience with Integrated Rural Accessibility Planning
• Experience with transport and social dimensions, including gender
• Having worked for a multilateral or bilateral donor or international research institution 
• Proven networking skills
• Proven writing skills
• Member of IFRTD and/or member of a National Forum Group