The Asia Pacific Farmers’ Programme (APFP) will build on the coverage of Medium-Term Cooperation Programme Phase 2 (MTCP2), with a further expansion to six additional countries where International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is actively engaged, bringing the total regional coverage to 29 countries. The full coverage of all the target countries will be reviewed based on the resource mobilization effort that will be jointly conducted by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Asian Farmers Association for Sustainable Rural Development (AFA).  Furthermore, the Asia Pacific Farmers’ Programme (APFP) also seeks to obtain a more balanced partitioning of efforts between the sub-regions. For the countries by sub-region in SAARC, Agribusiness Support Fund (ASF) is sole national implementation agency (NIA) in Pakistan.

The overall project goal is to contribute to an enabling environment for rural poverty reduction, through instrumental support to rural smallholders and their organizations at national, sub-regional and regional levels in Asia and the Pacific.

Activities:

FO services development

•    Development of FO (demand-driven) business services
•    Financing agribusiness partnerships
•   Development of (national and sub/regional) services centres (business and advisory)

Policy engagement

•   Technical assistance support for national, sub-regional and regional capacity-building
•  Policy engagement and multi-level representation
•  Policy and knowledge development fund

Program management and coordination